Researchers have detected the most distant wandering supermassive black hole observed so far, located more than 30,000 light years from the center of its galaxy. The finding relied on a tidal disruption event where the black hole tore apart a star.
A team led by Robert Stein at the University of Maryland spotted the object after a machine learning algorithm flagged a burst of light in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility in California. Follow-up observations with additional telescopes confirmed the event, named TDE 2025abcr.
Stein noted that the location appears as an empty patch of sky, unlike previous cases near galactic centers or in merging dwarf galaxies. The distance exceeds that of our solar system from the Milky Way center by several thousand light years.
Wandering black holes typically result from galaxy mergers that eject one central black hole. This discovery could help map how often such mergers occur and how galaxies evolve, Stein said.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time in Chile has recently started operations and is expected to detect hundreds of similar events in coming years.