NASA Swift Detects Wandering Supermassive Black Hole Shredding Star

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured a tidal disruption event caused by a rogue supermassive black hole located far outside the core of a distant galaxy about 750 million light‑years away. The flare, first flagged by the Zwicky Transient Facility, outshone its host galaxy in ultraviolet light and reached temperatures of roughly 54,000 °F (30,000 °C). Follow‑up observations with ground‑based telescopes, including the SOAR telescope in Chile, confirmed the event as a star being torn apart by a black hole roughly one million times the mass of the Sun.

The discovery validates a new technique for locating otherwise invisible wandering black holes and expands understanding of black‑hole distribution beyond galactic nuclei. Findings were reported by research fellow Robert Stein of the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.