First confirmed off center supermassive black hole rips star apart
Astronomers just caught a supermassive black hole wandering outside its galaxy's center, ripping apart a star and lighting up space with an epic flash.
Usually, these black holes stay put in galactic cores, so seeing one roaming is rare, and this is the first time anyone has confirmed such an event away from a galaxy's center.
An article reporting the findings was published July 29, 2026.
Zwicky Transient Facility AI flagged event
The dramatic scene happened 750 million light-years away and was first picked up by California's Zwicky Transient Facility during its regular sky scans.
With help from an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm sifting through vast amounts of data, researchers flagged this unusual event, then NASA and Chilean telescopes confirmed it was not anything else.
The black hole is about as massive as the one at our Milky Way's heart and probably got kicked out during a galactic merger.
As Suvi Gezari put it, "This discovery will have a huge impact. It means that we're going to find many more examples of wandering black holes, and we can understand how galaxies and their black holes merge and build up over time."