Astronomers identify one of the universe's rarest black hole events

Blazing like 10 billion suns: NASA’s Swift sees a wandering black hole devouring a star NASA’s Swift Observatory observed a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star more than 30,000 light-years from the center of a distant galaxy. The extraordinary flare briefly outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet light and revealed a black hole about a million times the Sun’s mass.

This finding could reshape scientists’ understanding of how massive black holes move through the universe after galaxies collide. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.