In a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have detected powerful radio signals from a black hole tearing apart a star—and surprisingly, it didn’t happen in the center of a galaxy, where such violent events usually occur.
This marks the first time scientists have observed such bright and fast-evolving radio waves from a tidal disruption event (TDE) located far from a galactic core.
The study, led by Dr. Itai Sfaradi and Professor Raffaella Margutti from the University of California, Berkeley, was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The event, called AT 2024tvd, showed the fastest-changing radio emission ever recorded from a black-hole-powered stellar destruction.
“This is truly extraordinary,” said Dr. Sfaradi. “Never before have we seen such bright radio emission from a black hole tearing apart a star, away from a galaxy’s center, and evolving this fast. It changes how we think about black holes and their behavior.”
Tidal disruption events occur when a star strays too close to a massive black hole and is ripped apart by its gravity.
In most cases, these events happen around supermassive black holes that sit at the centers of galaxies.
But this black hole was discovered about 2,600 light-years—roughly 15 trillion kilometers—from the center of its host galaxy, showing that enormous black holes can exist in unexpected places.
The discovery was made using some of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, including the Very Large Array (VLA) in the U.S., ALMA in Chile, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), and the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array (AMI-LA) in the UK. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem team, led by Professor Assaf Horesh, played a key role through detailed observations with the AMI-LA.
These measurements revealed that the radio waves from AT 2024tvd changed unusually quickly—an important clue about what was happening near the black hole.
The data showed two separate bursts, or flares, of radio emission that evolved faster than in any previous TDE.
This suggests that powerful jets or outflows of gas were ejected from the black hole months after the star was first destroyed. Such a delay hints at complex, ongoing activity—almost as if the black hole briefly “woke up” again after its initial feeding frenzy.
“This discovery shows that black holes can remain active and unpredictable long after tearing apart a star,” said Prof. Horesh.
“It’s a reminder that even far from galactic centers, the universe can surprise us with its hidden power.”
Source: KSR.
