A mysterious, brilliantly bright eruption in deep space is one of the rarest cosmic interactions ever observed by astronomers. Using a new search method, NASA researchers successfully identified an “orphan” supermassive black hole dining on a wayward star about 750 million light-years from Earth. The details are described in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Almost every known galaxy is centered on a supermassive black hole that devours anything unfortunate enough to fall into its gravitational pull. However, black holes also receive a special meal about once every 100,000 years. Occasionally, a star will drift too close and begin disintegrating under the incomprehensible forces at work, kicking off a luminous situation called a tidal disruption event (TDE). While rare in individual galaxies, there are millions of cosmic neighborhoods in the universe, so astronomers usually spot around 30 TDEs per year in various galactic cores.
That all changed in 2024. During a routine astronomical survey, researchers identified all the prerequisite indications of a TDE—except this one was around 2,600 light-years away from its host galaxy’s center. Experts then began searching outside of traditional locations for “wandering” black hole TDEs. In November 2025, a team of NASA collaborators flagged another suspect using a recently developed algorithmic program in conjunction with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Southern California’s Palomar Observatory.
“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,” Robert Stein, a study-coauthor and astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in a statement.
This TDE is much farther away from a galactic center—about 30,000 light-years towards the edge of a galaxy in the Cetus constellation designated J014656.04-152214.7. The black hole is about one million times the sun’s mass, and generated a TDE so bright that its ultraviolet light even outshone the host galaxy for months. At its peak, the stellar death emitted the luminosity of around 10 billion suns. Other institutions around the world soon set their sights on the subject to confirm its identity and gather more information. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope even managed to take its temperature—a mind-melting 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But while the scale of the event is difficult to comprehend, the location of the stellar destruction is particularly fascinating.
“It must have originated in a galaxy’s center, but not the one it’s in the outskirts of now,” said Stein.
The team believes another supermassive black hole is still inside the galaxy’s core, and the orphan comes from one of two possibilities. In one scenario, the black hole originated in a smaller dwarf galaxy that is merging into its current home. Another theory broadens the scope to include three or more galaxies colliding, whose resultant gravitational struggles tossed the lightest black hole towards the periphery.
Regardless of the answer, researchers now have a new and highly effective technique to search for wandering black hole TDEs. In the coming years, additional tools like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will improve the hunt.
“Further discoveries could reveal the origin of this apparent ‘orphan’ black hole,” said Stein. “The key science question we want to answer is: How common are wandering black holes?”
