Hubble Telescope sees wandering black hole slurping up stellar spaghetti

Astronomers have caught a black hole far from the center of its home galaxy ripping a star to shreds — providing, for the first time, direct evidence of a rogue supermassive black hole in action.

The event, named AT2024tvd, took place approximately 600 million light-years from Earth. Despite weighing about a million times the mass of our sun, the black hole wasn't found at the center of its host galaxy, where such giants typically reside. It marks the first known instance of an "off-center" tidal disruption event (TDE), a phenomenon where a star is stretched and torn apart — or spaghettified — by a black hole's immense gravity.

Astronomers say the find opens the door for tracking down other rogue TDEs. "I think this discovery will motivate scientists to look for more examples of this type of event," Yuhan Yao, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study, said in a NASA statement.

The sudden, bright flare from the event was picked up by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a sky-surveying optical camera mounted on a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego. Follow-up observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that this black hole lies 2,600 light-years from the galaxy's core, where a much larger black hole resides — a behemoth 100 million times the mass of the sun.

The presence of two massive black holes in a single galaxy isn't unexpected, astronomers say. Most large galaxies contain at least one supermassive black hole at their center. Because galaxies frequently collide and merge over cosmic timescales, astronomers have long speculated that some galaxies might harbor multiple black holes, at least until they eventually collide and merge into an even larger black hole.