Close Menu
    "Space Jaws": NASA reveals roaming monster black hole that's eating stars
    Space

    “Space Jaws”: NASA reveals roaming monster black hole that’s eating stars

    Share.
    View 13 Comments

    13 Comments

    1. HungryKing9461 on

      Daaaaaaaaaaa dum.

      Daaaaaaaaaaa dum.

      De-de de-de de-de de-de

      De-de de-de de-de de-de

    2. ninjamullet on

      I wish it would eat reporters who come up with headlines like “space jaws”.

    3. SatisfactoryLoaf on

      I misread, and thought this was going to be another depressing performative political imposition on the space industry.

      Carry on with shark things.

    4. shifty_coder on

      Rogue black holes have been an irrational fear of mine since I first learned about them.

      Think about it, a hungry void hurtling unchecked through the galaxy, devouring everything in its path, undetectable (at the time). Basically the ‘Nothing’ from Neverending Story, but this one can’t even be stopped by our imagination.

    5. astroanthropologist on

      tldr; this black hole isn’t roaming the universe randomly, it’s still orbiting the centre of the galaxy it is in and is only called a “wandering black hole” because these black holes are usually in the centres of their galaxies, not off centre like this one. there is still another more massive black hole at the centre of this galaxy, as would be expected, and it’s possible this galaxy has two because there was a galaxy merger in the past. or maybe some weird formation mechanism since we don’t actually know how these super massive black holes form!

    6. StoovenMcStoovenson on

      Ah, sweet horrifying cosmic structures beyond my comprehension

    8. Sherifftruman on

      So this is basically like that video game that I see in random ads on the Internet? 😛

    9. Andromeda321 on

      Astronomer here! I study this sort of thing for a living, and was involved with some of the first radio observations of this source! (Terrible headline and not a great article though.)

      A [Tidal Disruption Event (TDE)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_disruption_event) occurs when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole, and gets torn apart by tidal forces. The process takes a few hours to unbind the star, and when this happens half the stellar material gets flung outwards, and half goes into orbit around the black hole in an accretion disk- very little falls into the black hole itself.

      Now the trouble with finding TDEs is that they’re VERY rare- maybe one in a million years in a galaxy like ours levels of rare. Further, the black holes that do this are of a specific size for physics reasons- a supermassive black hole (SMBH) which is about a million to 100 million times the mass of our sun. These SMBHs are almost always at the centers of galaxies- basically every large galaxy has one- so to date all TDEs found were in SMBHs at the galactic centers.

      Until this event, AT2024tvd! It was a TDE detected *off center* from its galactic center, causing considerable interest in the astronomical community. It’s still a masssive SMBH- 100 million times the mass of our sun- but is there in addition to the SMBH at the galactic center. So that’s exciting- until the TDE happened we had no way of detecting this black hole! How did it get there? We aren’t totally clear but a leading theory is there was a merger of two galaxies at some point earlier, leading to one galaxy with two SMBHs. Eventually it’ll probably merge with the other one.

      Anyway I LOVE TDEs so happy to answer any questions folks have on this event or any others! I also wrote [this article](https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-do-black-holes-swallow-stars/) about TDEs for *Astronomy* a few years back, and am just sending back edits to *Scientific American* on a piece about them for their July/August issue, which will be out next month!

    10. dediguise on

      Obviously this black hole is still following some kind of orbital pattern, but can rogue black holes exist the same way rogue planets can?

    12. greythicv on

      Can it come eat earth, we’re fucking doomed anyway at least it’d be a cool way to go out

    13. 4jet2116 on

      You know the thing about a black hole is he’s lifeless. Black. Like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya he doesn’t seem to be livin’…until he sucks ya in, and that the black glows over white and then…then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. Space turns red, in spite of all the emergency rocket boosters and warp speed it pulls ya in and…rips you to pieces…