Like a scene in a science fiction movie, astronomers using NASA telescopes discovered the "space chin".

Within the dark and black depth between the stars, lurking 600 million light-years away, an invisible monster stormed down along any willful star. The sneaky black hole betrays its presence in a newly determined Tide Destruction Event (TDE), where an unfortunate star is torn apart and swallowed in spectacular radiation. These destruction events are powerful probes of black hole physics, revealing the conditions for launching jets and winds when black holes consume stars and are seen as bright objects by telescopes.

The new TDE, known as AT2024TVD, allows astronomers to use NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint a wandering super-large black hole with similar support for Chandra X-ray observations from NASA, and NRAO's NRAO array is also a very large array, which also indicates that the black hole deviates from the Callaxy center of Calaxy.

The paper will be published in the upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letter.

Surprisingly, this one million molar mass black hole does not exist exactly in the center of the host galaxy, where super-large black holes are often found and actively swallowing up the surrounding material. So far, this is the first time that offset TDE has been determined in approximately 100 TDE events recorded by the optical sky survey. The rest are related to the central black holes of the galaxy.

In fact, in the center of the host Milky Way, there is a different supermass black hole that weighs 100 million times the mass of the sun. Hubble's optical accuracy shows that the larger black holes of TDE and Galaxy's Center are only 2,600 light-years. That's just one tenth of what we have between our sun and the massive black hole in the central Milky Way.

This larger black hole emits energy because it absorbs inserted gas and classifies it as an active galactic nucleus. Strangely, two super-large black holes coexist in the same galaxy, but are not bound to binary pairs of gravity. Smaller black holes may eventually rotate to the center of the Milky Way, merge with larger black holes. But for now, it's too far to combine in gravity.

TDE occurs when the huge gravity tidal force of a black hole stretches or "spots". Pull the chopped star residue into a circular orbit around the black hole. This creates shock and high temperatures that can be seen in UV and visible light.

“AT2024TVD is the first offset TDE captured by Optical Sky Surveys, which opens up the full possibilities of exploring this elusive wandering black hole with future Sky Surveys,” said Yuhan Yao, lead study author at UC Berkeley. “At present, theorists have not given much attention to offset TDE. “I think this discovery will inspire scientists to look for more examples of such events.” ”

When several ground-based sky survey telescopes observe flares as bright as supernova, the star's black hole disappears. But unlike supernova, astronomers know this is a black hole snack on stars due to the torch being hot, and it shows wide emission lines of hydrogen, helium, carbon, carbon, nitrogen and silicon. The Zwicky transient facility at Caltech Palomar Observatory, whose 1.2-meter telescope surveys the entire northern sky every two days, first observed the event.

"Tidal destruction events illuminate the existence of huge black holes that we would otherwise not detect," said Ryan Chornock, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an associate professor on the ZTF team. "Theorists have predicted that there must be a large number of black holes far from the center of the galaxy, but now we can use TDE to find them."

The flares appear to be offset by the center of the bright giant galaxy due to Pan-Starrs (Panorama Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System), Sloan Digital Sky Survey and DESI traditional imaging surveys. To better determine that it wasn't in the center of the Galaxy, Yao's team used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm that X-rays from the torch site were also offset.

Hubble solves any uncertainty. Hubble's sensitivity to UV light also allows it to determine the location of TDE, which is bluer than the rest of the galaxies.

The black hole in charge of TDE is breeding inside the bulges of the large Milky Way. When a black hole "captures a star", it only takes tens of thousands of years to become obvious, and then quiet again until the next meal follows.

How do black holes deviate from the center? Previous theoretical research shows that due to tribody interaction, the lowest mass members are kicked out of the tribody interaction, and black holes can be popped up from the center of the galaxy. This may be the case given the invisible black holes’ proximity to the central black hole. "If the black hole triple interacts with two other black holes in the core of the Milky Way, it can still tie up with the Milky Way, bypassing the central region in the central region," Yao said.

Another explanation is that the black hole is the remains of a smaller Milky Way that merged with the host galaxy 1 billion years ago. If this is the case, then the black hole may eventually merge with the centrally active black hole sometime in the far future. So, for the moment, astronomers don't know it's coming.

Erica Hammerstein, another postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, carefully looked at Hubble images as part of the study, but found no evidence of past galaxy mergers. But she explained: "There is already good evidence that the galaxy merger has increased the TDE rate, but there is a second black hole in the AT2024TVD's host Milky Way, which means that there will be a merger sometime in the past of this galaxy."

Specializes in different kinds of light such as Hubble and Chandra, working together and better understand such transient events. Future telescopes will also be optimized for telescopes used to capture such temporary activities, including the National Science Foundation's Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. They will provide more opportunities for subsequent Hubble observations for the exact location of the transient.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation for more than three decades and continues to make groundbreaking discoveries to shape our basic understanding of the universe. Hubble is an international cooperation project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland manages telescopes and mission operations. Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space also supports Goddard's mission operations. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore is run by the University’s Astronomy Research Association and conducts Hubble Science operations for NASA.

ZTF is a public-private partnership with equal support from the ZTF Partnership and the National Science Foundation.