A mysterious, bright flare 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 feeding on a wayward star about 750 million light years from Earth. The details are described in a study recently published in The letters from the astrophysical diary.

Almost every known galaxy is centered on a supermassive black hole that devours anything unlucky enough to fall into its gravitational pull. However, black holes also receive special food about once every 100,000 years. Occasionally, a star will get too close and begin to disintegrate under the incomprehensible forces at work, initiating a luminous situation called a tidal disturbance event (TDE). While rare in individual galaxies, there are millions of cosmic neighborhoods in the universe, so astronomers typically detect about 30 TDEs per year in various galactic nuclei.

That all changed in 2024. During a routine astronomical survey, researchers identified all the previous signs of a TDE, except that this one was about 2,600 light-years away from the center of its host galaxy. Then, experts began looking outside the traditional “wandering” black hole EDT sites. In November 2025, a team of NASA collaborators pointed to another suspect using an algorithmic program recently developed in conjunction with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.

“Of the half a million flashes that ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that closely resembled a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location on the outskirts of a galaxy,” Robert Stein, study co-author and astronomer at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in a statement.

This TDE is a lot further from a galactic center, about 30,000 light years toward the edge of a galaxy in the Cetus constellation called J014656.04-152214.7. The black hole is about a million times the mass of the Sun and generated a TDE so bright that its ultraviolet light even eclipsed the host galaxy for months. At its peak, the stellar death emitted the luminosity of about 10 billion suns. Other institutions around the world soon set their sights on the subject to confirm his identity and gather more information. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory space telescope even managed to take its temperature: a staggering 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But while the magnitude of the event is difficult to comprehend, the site of the stellar destruction is particularly fascinating.

“It must have originated in the center of a galaxy, but not the one now on the outskirts,” Stein said.

The team believes there is still another supermassive black hole within the galaxy’s core, and that the orphan comes from one of two possibilities. In one scenario, the black hole originated in a smaller dwarf galaxy that is merging with its current home. Another theory expands the scope to include the collision of three or more galaxies, whose resulting gravitational struggles threw the lighter black hole toward the periphery.

Regardless of the answer, researchers now have a new and highly effective technique for searching for errant 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 search.

“New discoveries could reveal the origin of this apparent ‘orphan’ black hole,” Stein said. “The key scientific question we want to answer is: How common are wandering black holes?”

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