Astronomers have published three separate studies this week that together paint a new picture of black holes on the move: objects that have escaped their galactic homes, shredded passing stars, or reached across hundreds of thousands of light-years to disrupt a neighbouring galaxy.
A clear sighting of a wandering black hole
For the first time, researchers have obtained a clean observation of a supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy during a merger. The object, designated TDE 2025abcr, was detected using a machine learning algorithm trained on past tidal disruption event (TDE) light curves and applied to data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) starting in August 2025.
The black hole, with a mass of roughly one million Suns, now wanders without a significant stellar halo. Its parent galaxy, itself a Milky-Way-sized object, merged with a much larger galaxy whose central black hole weighs about one billion solar masses. Gravitational interactions during the merger stripped the smaller black hole away.
The finding, led by Robert Stein of the University of Maryland, was confirmed using optical spectra from the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope in Chile and X-ray and ultraviolet data from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Follow-up observations with the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the James Webb Space Telescope detected infrared emission from the TDE, which may indicate a sparse cluster of remnant stars still bound to the wandering black hole.
Kishore Patra of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the JWST follow-up, said this was the first time the intrinsic infrared emission from a TDE could be cleanly observed.
The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and on arXiv (2604.16093v1).
Swift catches an orphan black hole shredding a star
In a separate detection, NASA’s Swift Observatory spotted a supermassive black hole consuming a star more than 30,000 light-years from the centre of its host galaxy, a galaxy 750 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus. The black hole, also about one million solar masses, temporarily outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths, radiating with the energy of roughly 10 billion Suns.
The event was first flagged in November 2025 by ZTF’s artificial intelligence algorithm, which automatically identified the flare as a likely TDE despite its unusual off-centre location. Spectroscopic confirmation came from the SOAR telescope.
Stein, who also led this study, said the team was looking for star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from galactic cores, and that this discovery validated a new technique.
The black hole may have been ejected by gravitational interactions between three or more merging galaxies, or it could belong to a dwarf galaxy currently merging with the larger host. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Swift is currently awaiting an orbit boost planned for summer 2026; once it resumes normal operations, it could continue searching for more off-centre black holes. Upcoming surveys from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are expected to dramatically expand the sample.
Chandra finds a black hole jet stirring up the ‘red potato’ galaxy
A third study used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to show that a supermassive black hole jet is suppressing star formation in a nearby galaxy nicknamed the “red potato.” The galaxy, formally designated MQN01 J004131.9-493704, lies 11.7 billion light-years away and is seen as it was when the universe was roughly two billion years old.
The red potato sits at the intersection of a cosmic web of early galaxies and is surrounded by cold, dense gas that should be actively forming stars, but it is not. Chandra detected a jet from a supermassive black hole in a neighbouring galaxy roughly 200,000 light-years away, pointed directly at the red potato. The jet injects energy into the gas, heating it and preventing it from collapsing.
Weichen Wang of the University of Milan-Bicocca, who led the study, said stars were not forming like expected, so the team searched for the reason why and found there may be a cook in this cosmic kitchen.
The research, published on July 7 in Astronomy and Astrophysics, is among the first to investigate gas behaviour around non-star-forming galaxies in the early universe and demonstrates how active black holes in one galaxy can regulate star formation in a neighbour.
Sources: Science, NASA/Swift, Space.com/Chandra