Black holes caught devouring massive stars in biggest explosion since Big Bang

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Black holes caught devouring massive stars in biggest explosion since Big Bang The three examples astronomers highlighted in a new study describe supermassive black holes feasting on stars more than three times as massive as our own sun.
Supermassive black holes lurk all throughout the known universe, but catching one in the act of devouring its cosmic dinner doesn't happen all that often.
In fact, unless a black hole is actively in the middle of eating gas, dust or massive stars, the ominous entities remain invisible to us. It's when black holes emerge out of hiding to feast on their prey and some type of matter is sucked into their celestial maw that they begin to glow brightly.
And recently, a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii may have seen more than they anticipated. Using both space and ground-based data, the researchers uncovered black hole events so packed with energy, they said they represented the biggest explosions since the Big Bang.
The three examples the team highlighted in a new study describe supermassive black holes feasting on stars more than three times as massive as our own sun. The events, dubbed 'extreme nuclear transients,' are not only more rare than a supernova star explosion, but are more powerful than 100 supernovae combined, the team claimed.
Here's what to know about how the powerful forces may have shaped galaxies and how the discovery may help astronomers better study black holes.
What are black holes?
Supermassive black holes, regions of space where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light doesn't have enough energy to escape, are often considered terrors of the known universe.
When any object gets close to a supermassive black hole, it's typically ensnared in a powerful gravitational pull. That's due to the event horizon – a theoretical boundary known as the "point of no return" where light and other radiation can no longer escape.
As their name implies, supermassive black holes are enormous (Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our Milky Way, is 4.3 million times bigger than the sun.) They're also scarily destructive and perplexing sources of enigma for astronomers who have long sought to learn more about entities that humans can't really get anywhere near.
Black holes: NASA finds supermassive black hole it calls 'Space Jaws'
Supermassive black holes seen eating giant stars
Each of the supermassive black holes the researchers described lies at the center of a distant galaxy. And each were observed to have suddenly brightened for several months after shredding up a star three to 10 times heavier than our sun – unleashing enormous amounts of radiations across their host galaxies.
The scientists involved in the new study described these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called 'extreme nuclear transients.'
One of the transient events the astronomers looked at released 25 times more energy than the most powerful supernova on record ‒ radiating in one year the amount of energy equal to the lifetime output of 100 of our suns.
Since just 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients are a different way to find black holes across vast cosmic distances, which in astronomy means peering back in time, Benjamin Shappee, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who co-authored the study, said in a statement.
'These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,' Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii who led the new study, added in a statement.
Discovery comes after detection of 'space jaws'
The new discovery was announced not long after NASA's famed Hubble Space Telescope helped uncover another covert black hole that had long eluded detection.
That supermassive black hole was so menacing that NASA even dubbed it in a blog post as "space jaws" – a reference to Steven Spielberg's famous 1975 shark film.
"Space jaws" revealed itself to astronomers earlier in 2025 with a spectacular burst of radiation known as a tidal disruption event that was so large and so bright that several NASA instruments were able to detect it 600 million light-years from Earth.
Finding 'extreme nuclear transients' could unveil more black holes
In the University of Hawaii's study, researchers examined three black holes discovered within the last decade.
One of the star-destroying events, nicknamed 'Barbie' because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in California. The other two black holes were first detected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018.
Data from a number of spacecraft and ground-based observatories helped the team confirm their findings.
Though the team concluded the events to be rare, the extreme brightness they produced means they can be seen even in extremely distant galaxies. Astronomers who took part in the study say looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil more supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet.
The team's findings were published Wednesday, June 4, in the journal Science Advances.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [e-mail]