Shredded star reveals a massive black hole wandering far from its galaxy's center

Astronomers have discovered a star being torn apart by a massive black hole more than 1,000 parsecs from the center of its host galaxy. The tidal disruption event, TDE 2023mfm, was first discovered by ZTF and then studied with a wide range of telescopes, including Keck, Lick, Hubble, Swift, Chandra, XMM-Newton and the VLA. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 28.