NASA Swift Observatory confirms wandering supermassive black hole tore apart star far from galaxy core
A star was torn apart 30,000 light-years from its galaxy's center, far from where supermassive black holes normally hide. NASA's Swift Observatory confirmed the flare came from a wandering black hole with roughly a million solar masses, first flagged by an AI scanning nightly sky
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has confirmed a rare astronomical event: a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole located more than 30,000 light-years from the center of its host galaxy, roughly 750 million light-years from Earth. Most black holes that shred passing stars, a process called a tidal disruption event, sit at a galaxy's core. This one does not. The black hole carries roughly a million times the mass of the Sun. As it consumed the star, the resulting flare briefly outshone the black hole's entire host galaxy in ultraviolet light, according to NASA. The discovery began in November 2025, when an artificial intelligence algorithm flagged an unusual brightening among the roughly half a million flashes the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory detects across the sky each night. Swift's follow-up observations confirmed the source as a wandering black hole on the outskirts of its galaxy. No tidal disruption event has previously been confirmed so far from a galaxy's core. Astronomers believe wandering supermassive black holes are often the remnants of smaller galaxies absorbed in past mergers. The finding suggests automated detection systems are now sensitive enough to catch these black holes in the act, in locations researchers were not systematically searching.