A black hole shredded a massive star in a record-breaking explosion, but what astronomers discovered afterward may be even more remarkable.
Black holes are among the most destructive objects in the universe, but astronomers have now witnessed one carrying out an act of cosmic violence unlike anything seen before. A newly discovered event appears to show a black hole ripping apart a massive star, triggering an explosion so powerful that it surpassed every known stellar-collapse explosion ever recorded.
The event, officially named AT2024wpp and nicknamed the Whippet, briefly released as much energy as 400 billion Suns. That makes it far more powerful than a typical supernova and brighter than any previously observed explosion powered by the collapse of a star.
Researchers believe the outburst began when a massive star ventured too close to a black hole. The black hole’s immense gravity stretched and shredded the star, drawing some of its material into a superheated disk. As the debris spiraled inward, it emitted intense X-rays and drove a powerful wind into gas the star had shed before its final destruction.
Daniel Perley, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University and lead author of the study, described the scene at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting: “We discovered what we think is a black hole merging with a massive companion star, shredding it into a disk that feeds the black hole. It’s a rare and awe-inspiring phenomenon.”
Inside the Record-Breaking Cosmic Explosion
Astronomers have seen black holes destroy stars before in events known as Tidal Disruption Events. What makes the Whippet unusual is its scale, speed, and brightness. It also belongs to a rare class called Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients, or LFBOTs, which flare brightly in blue and ultraviolet light and fade much faster than ordinary supernovae.
Anna Ho, an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University and a co-author of the study, spotted the Whippet soon after its light reached Earth using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. Within a day, the Liverpool Telescope in the Canary Islands and NASA’s Swift satellite confirmed that the object was intensely blue and producing X-rays.
Distance measurements from R. Michael Rich at UCLA and Yu-Jing Qin at Caltech showed that the blast was far too energetic to be a normal supernova. Its extreme heat and fast evolution pointed instead to a star being shredded and swallowed by a black hole.
“Even though we suspected what it was, it was still extraordinary,” Perley said. “This was many times more energetic than any similar event and more than any known explosion powered by the collapse of a star.”
“Not only do these events help us identify black holes, they provide a new way to identify where black holes occur and how they form and grow, and the physics of how this happens,” Perley added.
Shock Waves Reveal the Star’s Final Moments
The Whippet also revealed something astronomers usually cannot see directly: the hidden gas around a doomed star. A shock wave raced outward at about one-fifth the speed of light, plowing into dense material nearby before suddenly “fizzling out” after roughly half a year. Researchers think the shock faded when it reached the outer edge of a bubble carved by gas the star had lost before the final encounter.
That surrounding gas helped turn the black hole’s feeding process into a brilliant display. The disk around the black hole produced X-rays and a powerful gas “wind,” which slammed into the star’s earlier outflows. That collision created the blue optical and ultraviolet glow seen in the first days, followed by radio and millimeter signals later on.
A Mystery That Still Challenges Astronomers
One of the strangest clues appeared only after the event began to fade. Early observations from Keck Observatory, Magellan Observatory, and the Very Large Telescope showed almost no recognizable chemical fingerprints. Later, weak signs of hydrogen and helium emerged. The helium was moving toward Earth at more than 6,000 kilometers per second (about 3,700 miles per second), suggesting that some dense structure survived the initial blast.
The team thinks this could be a stream of material pulled from the star’s core as the black hole tore it apart. A more speculative possibility is that another object in the system, perhaps a third star, was blasted by the black hole’s particle wind and X-ray radiation.
Reference: “AT 2024wpp: an extremely luminous fast ultraviolet transient powered by accretion onto a black hole” by Daniel A Perley, Anna Y Q Ho, Zoë McGrath, Michael Camilo, Cassie Sevilla, Ping Chen, Genevieve Schroeder, Taya Govreen-Segal, Aleksandra Bochenek, Yu-Jing Qin, James H Gillanders, Benjamin Amend, Joseph P Anderson, Igor Andreoni, Amar Aryan, Eric C Bellm, Joshua S Bloom, Thomas de Boer, Jonathan Carney, Ilaria Caiazzo, Ken C Chambers, Panos Charalampopoulos, Ting-Wan Chen, Tracy X Chen, Eric R Coughlin, Michael Coughlin, Michel Dennefeld, Georgios Dimitriadis, Christoffer Fremling, Danielle Frostig, Avishay Gal-Yam, Lluís Galbany, Anjashay Gangopadhyay, Melzie Ghendrih, Matthew J Graham, Mariusz Gromadzki, Steven L Groom, Claudia P Gutiérrez, K -Ryan Hinds, Mark E Huber, Cosimo Inserra, Benjamin C Kaiser, Mansi M Kasliwal, Niilo E Koivisto, Chien-Cheng Lin, Chang Liu, Thomas B Lowe, Eugene Magnier, Ashish A Mahabal, Andrew Milligan, Paloma Minguez, Geoffrey Mo, Tomás E Müller-Bravo, Matt Nicholl, Priscila J Pessi, Giuliano Pignata, Josiah Purdum, Nabeel Rehemtulla, R Michael Rich, Anwesha Sahu, Avinash Singh, Stephen J Smartt, Ian A Smith, Jesper Sollerman, Gokul Srinivasaragavan, Shubham Srivastav, Robert D Stein, Steve Schulze, Jack W Tweddle, Richard Wainscoat, Jacob L Wise, Lin Yan and David R Young, 10 April 2026, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag678
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