Distant Black Hole Found Crunching on a Big Star
15th Nov. 2025
Astronomers say they have recorded the brightest and, by many reckonings, the most distant flare ever seen from a supermassive black hole. Such outburst are rarely observed when a star wandered close to a black hole, and was torn apart. This glow was detected first in wide-field sky surveys and was then followed up across the electromagnetic spectrum. It briefly outshone entire galaxies and is giving scientists a rare, close-up view of a catastrophic encounter in the early universe.
The event was initially picked up by the Zwicky Transient Facility, the automated sky survey run from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, which flagged it as an unusually bright. Subsequent analysis, described in a journal article in Nature Astronomy, indicates that the flare rose by a factor of roughly 40 over months. At peak, it radiated the equivalent light of about 10 trillion Suns, roughly 30 times brighter than any previously observed black-hole flare. The object responsible is an actively feeding nucleus, cataloged as J2245+3743, lying at cosmological distances so large that astronomers are seeing an event that happened when the universe was considerably younger.
Estimates of the black hole’s mass and distance differ slightly among groups and methods, a normal outcome when observers push instruments to the limits. Caltech scientists cited an active black hole with an estimated mass near 500 million times that of the Sun and a distance of about 10 billion light-years. A Reuters account drawing on the same study reported a mass nearer 300 million solar masses and placed the system roughly 11 billion light-years away. In either case, the flare is orders of magnitude more energetic than typical tidal disruption events, in which a star is ripped apart by a black hole’s tidal forces.
Researchers favor the explanation that a very massive star perhaps tens to a few hundred times the mass of our Sun was scattered onto a plunging orbit. It was stretched and shredded by tidal forces, and then fed a sudden torrent of matter into the black hole’s accretion flow. As the stellar debris fell inward it heated and emitted intense radiation across wavelengths, producing the observed flare. That interpretation emerges from the energetics, the speed of the flare’s rise and decay, and multi-instrument follow-up by X-ray and optical telescopes.
The discovery underscores how modern time-domain surveys and rapid follow-up are changing the study of transient phenomena. Instruments such as ZTF act as all-sky sentinels, finding rare, fleeting events. X-ray observatories, in particular, have been crucial in diagnosing tidal disruption events and separating them from more routine variability in active galactic nuclei. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Center has emphasized that catching such “star-eating” episodes is how astronomers can sometimes glimpse elusive populations of black holes and understand how black holes grow over cosmic time.
Scientists say this particular flare is important on several counts. Its brightness and distance push models of how black holes interact with stellar populations in galactic nuclei; the event may point to dynamic interactions in dense star clusters or to the presence of unusually massive stars near a supermassive black hole. Moreover, the intensity of the outburst offers a testbed for how matter behaves in extreme gravity. It also show how quickly an accretion disk can form from disintegrated stellar material, and how that disk can launch energetic outflows and radiation.
The episode is a reminder that, even in a cosmos measured in billions of years and trillions of kilometers, violent interactions continue to unfold. As telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory come online in the near future, astronomers expect to find many more of these rare feasts, opening a new statistical window on how stars, black holes and galaxies evolve together.
Web Resources on Black Hole Found Crunching on a Big Star
1. Black Hole Flare is Biggest and Most Distant Seen
2. Star-eating black hole unleashes record-setting energetic flare
3. NASA’s Hubble, Chandra Spot Rare Type of Black Hole Eating a Star