By_Suraj Karowa/ANW
November 7, 2025
– In a universe where black holes are the ultimate devourers, astronomers have witnessed a feast for the ages. Dubbed “Superman,” the largest and most distant flare ever recorded from a supermassive black hole erupted 10 billion light-years away, unleashing a blaze equivalent to 10 trillion suns.
This cataclysmic event, captured in data from Earth’s observatories, isn’t just a light show—it’s a window into the violent birth pangs of galaxies and the hidden lives of monster stars.
The flare’s origin lies at the heart of an active galactic nucleus (AGN), a blazing core where a supermassive black hole—estimated at 500 million solar masses—gorges on cosmic debris.
Gas and dust spiral into a scorching accretion disk, heating to millions of degrees and belching out radiation that outshines entire galaxies.
But Superman’s intensity demanded an extraordinary meal: the shredding of a star at least 30 times the sun’s mass, in a process known as a tidal disruption event (TDE).
“About 1 in 10,000 AGN show flaring, but this is so extreme it’s in its own league a one-in-a-million event,” says lead researcher Matthew Graham, a research professor at the California Institute of Technology.
His team’s findings, published Tuesday in Nature Astronomy, paint Superman as a record-breaker, dwarfing even the infamous “Scary Barbie” flare from 2020, which involved a star just 3 to 10 solar masses.
The discovery began serendipitously in November 2018, when the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory in California flagged an unusually bright transient. ZTF, a wide-field survey instrument on the Samuel Oschin Telescope, excels at spotting fleeting cosmic fireworks like supernovae.
Initially dismissed as a blazar—a black hole firing jets of plasma—Superman’s signal lingered, its brightness waxing and waning over the years . Reanalyzing the data five years later, Graham’s team uncovered the truth.
Follow-up spectra from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii revealed an AGN’s telltale glow, but amplified to absurd levels. “We ruled out explosions in the disk or other oddities,” Graham explains.
“The light curve fits a TDE perfectly: the star’s stretched remnants fueling a sustained outburst.” In a TDE, gravity wins ugly. A star ventures too close to the event horizon, where tidal forces—stronger than on any ocean world—rip it asunder.
One elongated tail feeds the black hole; the other loops out, cooling as it expands. Superman’s peak luminosity hit 30 times that of prior records, suggesting the victim was a behemoth, perhaps a Wolf-Rayet star, stripped of its outer layers and packed with heavy elements.
This isn’t just stellar barbecue; it’s evolutionary dynamite. “This is likely the most massive star ever seen shredded by a black hole,” notes coauthor K.E. Saavik Ford, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. “It implies vast populations of giant stars orbiting in AGN disks—remnants of the universe’s infancy.”
At 10 billion light-years distant, Superman’s light has journeyed since the cosmos was a toddler, roughly 3.8 billion years post-Big Bang. Due to cosmological time dilation—the stretching of space-time—the event unfolds in slow motion for us.
“Seven years here equate to two years there,” Graham says. “We’re viewing it at quarter speed, like a cosmic replay.”
The flare persists, the black hole midway through its meal—”a fish halfway down a whale’s gullet,” per Graham.
Ongoing monitoring with telescopes like Chile’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory could unmask more such rarities, probing how black holes sculpt their host galaxies.
Experts hail the find as paradigm-shifting. “We thought ‘Scary Barbie’ was an outlier, but Superman births a new class: extreme nuclear transients,” says Purdue University’s Danny Milisavljevic, who studied the prior event. “It challenges models of black hole-star dances, hinting at energies rivaling the sun’s total conversion to light.”
UC Berkeley’s Alex Filippenko, a pioneer in AGN physics, adds: “This flare seats us front-row to galactic cores, where stars, gas, and gravity clash in the universe’s fiercest labs. It illuminates black hole growth and their role in galaxy evolution.”
Superman underscores black holes’ dual nature: not mere voids, but engines of creation. By devouring stars, they seed heavy elements for new worlds, while their jets and outflows regulate star formation. In early galaxies, such events may have cleared paths for supermassive black holes to balloon, explaining monsters like Sagittarius A* in our Milky Way.
Yet mysteries abound. Why do massive stars flirt with doom near AGN? Were they born there, or captured from afar? Ford suggests: “Probing central stars at cosmic dawn reveals the galaxy assembly’s blueprint.”
As ZTF and Rubin scan the skies, Superman invites us to ponder: In the universe’s grand theater, black holes aren’t villains—they’re the directors, scripting the drama of existence. This flare, a billion-year echo, reminds us that even in darkness, light endures, fierce and unyielding.
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