A Rogue Black Hole of Unusual Size Is Devouring Stars in a Distant Galaxy

Astronomers have spotted an apparent supermassive black hole snacking on a star 600 million light-years away, wandering through a galaxy with an even larger black hole at its core. The event, dubbed AT2024tvd, was first spotted by the Palomar Observatory’s Zwicky Transient Facility and later confirmed by powerhouse space telescopes including Hubble and Chandra, which helped zero in on the cosmic crime scene. To the researchers’ surprise, the responsible black hole was not at the center of its host galaxy, as supermassive black holes tend to be. Rather, this one was 2,600 light-years from the galactic center—a huge distance on paper, but really just one-tenth the distance between our Sun and Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Tidal disruption events (TDEs) like this one occur when a black hole’s gravity pulls on a star so violently that the less massive ball of gas is stretched, shredded, and swirled around the black hole, in a process delightfully called s ... Read full article.