You must have seen black holes in sci-fi movies. Well, that visual just got real as a newly identified tidal disruption event (TDE), called AT2024tvd, allowed astronomers to pinpoint a wandering supermassive black hole using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, with similar supporting observations from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the NARO Very Large Array telescope that also showed the black hole is offset from the center of the galaxy.
A black hole revealed itself from 600 million light-years away when it ripped apart and swallowed a star. The resulting burst of radiation is the bright dot just off-center captured in this @NASAHubble image. https://t.co/g7mSVRZHd1 pic.twitter.com/7FnDsSmCb2
— NASA (@NASA) May 8, 2025
The black hole is said to have revealed itself from 600 million light-years away when it ripped apart and swallowed a star in a spectacular burst of radiation. The Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, with its 1.2-meter telescope that surveys the entire northern sky every two days, first observed the event.
The above picture is a six-panel illustration of a tidal disruption event around a supermassive black hole that shows- a supermassive black hole is adrift inside a galaxy, a wayward star gets swept up in the black hole’s intense gravitational pull, the star is stretched, star’s remnants form a disk around black hole, period of black hole accretion, pouring out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum and host galaxy, seen from afar, contains a bright flash of energy.
Surprisingly, this one-million-solar-mass black hole doesn’t reside exactly in the center of the host galaxy, where supermassive black holes are typically found, and actively gobble up surrounding material. There is also a supermassive black hole weighing 100 million times the mass of the Sun. Though the two black holes co-exist in the same galaxy, but are not gravitationally bound to each other in a binary way.
It is revealed that the black hole responsible for the TDE is prowling inside the bulge of the massive galaxy, and it only becomes apparent every few tens of thousands of years when it captures a star, and then it goes quiet again. NASA says that future telescopes that will also be optimized for capturing transient events like this one include the National Science Foundation’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will provide more opportunities for follow-up Hubble observations to zero in on a transient’s exact location.
