Biggest black hole ever detected gobbles up star — now bright as 10 trillion suns

It was a “light” meal for this star destroyer.

A black hole ate its way into the record books after devouring a star and creating a celestial outburst that burned with the light of a trillion suns, per a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This black hole flare, as the event is known, was the largest ever recorded, Space.com reported.

“This is really a one-in-a-million object,” said lead author Matthew Graham, a research professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, NBC News reported.

Discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the flare burst forth from a supermassive black hole at the heart of an Active Galactic Nucleus, the regions of galaxies where these cosmic chasms feed or accrete.

This particular star graveyard, dubbed J2245+3743, was located a record 10 billion light-years away from Earth.

This exceedingly rare solar flare phenomenon was sparked after an unusually large star was knocked off its orbit and into the suck zone of the galactic vortex, which boasts a mass 500 million times greater than the sun.

When the interstellar Icarus drew near, the gravitational pull tore it asunder while the remains were devoured by the black hole in an event scientists have deemed a tidal disruption event, or TDE.

“This is unlike any AGN we’ve ever seen,” said Graham, who is also a scientist with ZTF, noting that the heavenly Halogen was 30 times brighter than any prior solar flares.

Disproving the adage that “those that burn bright burn short,” the flare has been going strong for around seven years, according to Graham. However, its light is fading, indicating that it’s continuing to swallow the star that wandered too close — a phenomenon Graham analogized to “a fish only halfway down the whale’s gullet.”

First discovered in 2018 during a sky survey, the flare was described as a “particularly bright object,” but scientists weren’t able to glean much beyond that during followup observations.

But it wasn’t until 2023 that distance measurements and other observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii revealed just how energetic this flare really was.

“Suddenly it was: ‘Oh, this is actually quite far away,’” Graham said. “And if it’s that far away and it’s this bright, how much energy is being put out? This is now something unusual and very interesting.”

Graham said that the findings ultimately help shed new light on how black holes behave.

“There was this classic image that most galaxies in the universe have a supermassive black hole in the middle and it just sits there and burbles along and that’s it,” said Graham. “Now we know it’s a much more dynamic environment and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.”