Published on Nov. 4, 2025, 4:00 PM
Researchers said the flare at its peak was 10 trillion times brighter than the sun
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists are observing the most energetic flare ever seen emanating from a supermassive black hole, apparently caused when this celestial beast shredded and swallowed a huge star that strayed too close.
The researchers said the flare at its peak was 10 trillion times brighter than the sun. It was unleashed by a black hole roughly 300 million times the mass of the sun residing inside a faraway galaxy, about 11 billion light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape. Most galaxies are thought to have one at their center. The black hole in this research is extremely massive – more so, for instance, than the one at the center of our Milky Way that possesses roughly 4 million times the mass of the sun.
The researchers said the most likely explanation for the flare is a large star being pulled into the black hole. As material from the ill-fated star falls inward, it causes a flare of energy when it reaches the black hole’s point of no return.
The researchers believe the star was at least 30 times, and perhaps up to 200 times, the mass of the sun. It may have been part of a population of stars orbiting in the vicinity of the black hole and somehow was sent too close through some interaction with another object in the neighborhood, the researchers said.
“It seems reasonable that it was involved in a collision with another more massive body in its original orbit around the supermassive black hole which essentially knocked it in,” said Caltech astronomer Matthew Graham, lead author of the study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.