{"id":551688,"date":"2026-07-30T18:21:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T18:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551688\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T18:21:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T18:21:11","slug":"nasa-telescope-captures-wandering-black-hole-devour-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/551688\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA telescope captures ‘wandering’ black hole devour star"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA telescope captures ‘wandering’ black hole devour star<\/p>\n

\"Matt<\/p>\n

A NASA telescope caught a black hole red-handed in the middle of devouring a nearby star on the outskirts of a galaxy 760 million light-years away.<\/p>\n

Video above: NASA illustration of a black hole devouring a star<\/p>\n

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory monitors outer space for powerful explosions and other cosmic events. In late 2025, researchers noticed a bright flare in the constellation Cetus. <\/p>\n

After some study, that bright flare turned out to reveal a supermassive black hole, and the flare itself was caused by the black hole shredding a nearby star, known scientifically as a tidal disruption event. According to NASA<\/a>, the black hole weighs in at about a million times the mass of our Sun. <\/p>\n

The researchers published their findings<\/a> on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

This GIF shows the galaxy WISEA J014656.04-152214.7, located about 750 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, before and after a tidal disruption event was spotted on its outer edge in November 2025. The black + symbol marks the host galaxy and the blue circle marks the approximate area of the wandering supermassive black hole. The blue dot that appears within the circle is not a new star, but the nearby star\u2019s energy being absorbed by the black hole.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

“We were looking for these star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from the galactic cores where they usually reside,” Robert Stein, the lead researcher on the paper, told NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The blue dot that is visible in the GIF above is the black hole’s accretion disk<\/a>, or the area where the diffuse material from the star collects as it circles the drain of the black hole’s singularity.<\/p>\n

The flare was originally seen by the Zwicky Transient Facility<\/a> (ZTF), a survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California that scans the night sky every two days. The flare was corroborated by several other telescopes and finally confirmed as a shredding black hole by Swift’s instruments.<\/p>\n

Stein explained that since 2024, his team has been utilizing a new artificial intelligence tool, called tdescore<\/a>, to identify cosmic anomalies as they scan the sky in depth every other night.<\/p>\n

“Out of the half million flashes ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that looked a lot like a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location in the outskirts of a galaxy,” Stein said. <\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

An artist\u2019s concept of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole, which reacts by launching a relativistic jet.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

TDEs were first predicted in the 1970s<\/a> and first recorded in the ’90s<\/a>. So far, astronomers have observed a little over 100 TDEs<\/a> in interstellar space, but more may be on the <\/a>way<\/a> with the premiere of new telescopes.<\/p>\n

“With this discovery, which is one of just a couple that have been confirmed so far, we’ve validated a new technique and can use it to hunt for more,” Stein said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA telescope captures ‘wandering’ black hole devour star A NASA telescope caught a black hole red-handed in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4645,400,77398,225647,3323,111,139,69,75111,147,270797,392,2737,20811,240983,3929,118155],"class_list":["post-551688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astronomy","tag-black-hole","tag-devour","tag-mmnd","tag-nasa","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-observatory","tag-science","tag-shredding","tag-space","tag-star","tag-supermassive-black-hole","tag-tde","tag-telescope","tag-tidal-disruption-event"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}