Astronomers have uncovered new details about the black hole that ripped apart a star in a tidal disruption event named AT2024tvd. Findings suggest it is a wandering supermassive black hole—the kind that is not located at the center of a visible galaxy. The paper outlining this research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 12.
A tidal disruption event (TDE) happens when a star wanders too close to a massive black hole and gets torn apart by its gravity. The shredded star’s gas then swirls into the glowing disk around the black hole, producing a bright flash that astronomers can detect.
A stellar shred
Astronomers detected this unusual TDE in 2024. AT2024tvd is notable because it is “off-nuclear,” or off-center, meaning it didn’t happen at the center of its host galaxy, where you’d normally expect a black hole to be. It sits about 0.8 kiloparsecs away from the nucleus of a massive galaxy roughly 100 billion times the sun’s mass.
In this new follow-up study, the team analyzed the leftover glow from the bright flashes of the tidal disruption event. They measured the black hole’s mass and found it’s around 1 million solar masses. Therefore, it is genuinely a supermassive black hole—not a smaller “intermediate-mass” black hole, which is a different, less-massive category.
By analyzing the light emitted by the event across X-ray, ultraviolet and optical wavelengths using a detailed physics model of the swirling disk of gas around black holes, the team obtained a black hole mass estimate that they state is “more reliable and better grounded, both observationally and theoretically.” This mass estimate lines up well with known relationships between black hole mass and other properties seen in other TDEs.
Only two other off-nuclear TDEs had been found before this one, and both of those were powered by smaller, intermediate-mass black holes living inside “ultra-compact dwarf” galaxies. But AT2024tvd is different.
A ‘galaxy-less’ wanderer
The team found no sign of a surrounding star cluster or dwarf galaxy, suggesting the black hole could be the leftover core of a galaxy that was torn apart during past interactions. The black hole’s mass turns out to be more than 3% of its surrounding stellar mass—an unusually high ratio that points to a galaxy that has been almost entirely stripped away, leaving behind only its dense core. Researchers say that this “strongly supports an origin as a highly tidally stripped remnant nucleus hosting a wandering SMBH.”
The stripping likely happened through a “minor merger”—a smaller galaxy gradually getting swallowed by a much larger one—rather than through a violent black hole ejection event. This is in agreement with a previous study‘s findings. The team notes that minor mergers are far more common than major ones, and that black holes pulled into massive galaxies through such mergers tend to stall on wide orbits for an extremely long time, away from the galaxy’s center.
They also say the absence of a detected stellar cluster doesn’t prove there’s no stellar population at all; it just means none has been detected with current instruments.
Interestingly, the team also calculated what the true central black hole of the host galaxy should weigh and found it should be far larger, more than a billion solar masses, further confirming that AT2024tvd’s black hole is a separate, displaced object and not the galaxy’s main black hole.
Future hunts
The team concludes that events like this are a rare but powerful way to find and study these “wandering,” hidden supermassive black holes, which would otherwise go undetected since they’re not lighting up a galaxy center or surrounded by visible stars. “AT2024tvd demonstrates that off-nuclear TDEs can provide a direct and physically grounded probe of the wandering SMBH population in the local universe,” they write.
Looking ahead, the team notes that upcoming wide-field sky surveys, like the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, are expected to turn up many more off-nuclear TDEs like this one. But X-ray observations will remain essential for pinning down reliable black hole masses, since X-rays trace emission from deep within the accretion disk, right next to the black hole itself.
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Publication details
M. Guolo et al, The Wandering Supermassive Black Hole Powering the Off-nuclear Tidal Disruption Event AT2024tvd, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2026). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae732d
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Off-center stellar death points to wandering supermassive black hole stripped of its own galaxy (2026, June 28)
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