Supermassive black hole “ate” a star, are we next? Here’s what NASA found out

Astronomers have for the first time witnessed a supermassive black hole eat a star “outside” the core of its host galaxy in a groundbreaking cosmic discovery, challenging long-held beliefs about where these entities reside.

The event “AT2024tvd” was detected 600 million light-years away and marks the first "offset" tidal disruption event (TDE) ever captured by optical sky surveys.

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Spotted initially by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and later confirmed through NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the event revealed a star being torn apart by a “wandering black hole” weighing around 1 million times the mass of the Sun.

“This is the first offset TDE captured by optical sky surveys,” said Yuhan Yao, lead study author and astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes.”

The black hole's dramatic meal caused an intense flare, brighter and hotter than a supernova, prompting a wave of follow-up observations.

TDEs occur when stars venture too close to black holes and are stretched into strands, a process nicknamed “spaghettification.” This creates shock waves and releases powerful bursts of energy, which telescopes can detect across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The discovery may lead to a new chapter in black hole science.

“Now we can use TDEs to find them,” said Ryan Chornock, a member of the ZTF team.

FAQs

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing(not even light) can escape from it. It forms when a massive star collapses under its gravity after running out of fuel.

Can we see black holes?

Not directly. Since light can’t escape them, black holes are invisible. But we can "see" them indirectly by observing how they affect nearby stars, gas, or light, such as glowing disks of material falling in or stars moving strangely near them.

Could a black hole come close to Earth?

It’s extremely unlikely. The nearest known black hole is thousands of light-years away. And even a “wandering” black hole like the one in the recent discovery is still safely hundreds of millions of light-years from us.