NASA TELESCOPE SPOTS WANDERING BLACK HOLE SHREDDING STAR FAR FROM GALAXY CENTRE

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has detected a rare cosmic event in which a black hole located tens of thousands of light-years from a galaxy's centre tore apart an approaching star. The discovery, designated TDE 2025abcr, represents the farthest offset ever recorded for an optically discovered tidal disruption event of this type. The black hole weighs approximately one million times the mass of the sun and was first identified in November 2025 through an unusual brightening detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility survey at Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to recognise the flare among half a million signals detected nightly by the survey.

The tidal disruption event occurred when the star drifted too close to the black hole and was torn apart by extreme gravitational forces. For several months, the resulting ultrabright flare outshone the entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths, temporarily radiating with the light of about 10 billion suns. The galaxy hosting the event lies approximately 750 million light-years away. Follow-up observations by the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope in Chile confirmed spectral features consistent with a tidal disruption event. Tidal disruption events are exceptionally rare, occurring on average once every 100,000 years across any given galaxy.

The discovery validates a new technique for locating otherwise invisible wandering black holes that have drifted from their galactic cores, according to a paper led by Robert Stein of the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The black hole may have been left behind after two galaxies merged or thrown outward through gravitational interactions with other black holes near the galaxy's centre. Researchers said the finding could reshape understanding of how supermassive black holes move through the universe and indicated the technique can now be used to search for additional wandering black holes.