NASA finds supermassive black hole called ‘Space Jaws:' Why it deserves sci-fi horror name

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13-05-2025

A monstrous black hole in a distant galaxy has earned itself a nickname worthy of a science-fiction horror movie for its gluttonous feasting on any stars that dare get near.
Meet "Space Jaws."
NASA coined the moniker inspired by Steven Spielberg's famous 1975 film for the supermassive black hole after the agency's telescopes uncovered it lurking like a cosmic predator 600 million light-years from Earth.
Until now, the menacing entity has been "an invisible monster gulping down any wayward star that plummets toward it," NASA said in a blog post about the black hole.
But the covert black hole revealed itself to astronomers earlier in 2025 with a spectacular burst of radiation known as a tidal disruption event. The explosion was so large and so bright that several NASA instruments, including the famed Hubble Space Telescope, were able to detect the black hole in an unexpected part of its host galaxy.
The black hole responsible for the cosmic disruption, which is prowling inside an enormous galaxy, only betrays its presence every few tens of thousands of years, according to a team of researchers responsible for uncovering it.
Why?
That's how long it would take for it to metaphorically "burp" up its stellar meals.
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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.
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The newly discovered supermassive black hole, which is about one million times the mass of our sun, perplexed the team of astronomers who found it for an odd reason: It doesn't reside exactly in the center of its host galaxy, where supermassive black holes are typically found.
That detail about the black hole makes the associated tidal disruption event the first of about 100 recorded so far that have not taken place in a galaxy's center, according to the researchers.
"Space Jaws" even co-exists with another even larger supermassive black hole, weighing in at a gargantuan 100 million times the mass of our sun.
As expected, that black hole does exist at the galaxy's center – a relatively short 2,600 light-years away from its smaller cousin. For comparison, the distance between those two black holes is one-tenth the distance between Earth's sun and Sagittarius A*.
In fact, researchers suspect there is most likely a third supermassive black hole somewhere in that distant galaxy that conspired with the larger of the three to give "Space Jaws" – the smallest among them – the boot from the center.
The offset black hole gave itself away when several ground-based sky survey telescopes observed a flare as bright as a supernova, but hotter and with tell-tale chemical emissions. The researchers then used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to better pinpoint the location of the tidal disruption event.
NASA then released imagery Hubble captured Jan. 16, 2025, in both ultraviolet and visible light wavelengths. The research will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Tidal disruption events occur when a black hole consumes a hapless star, ripping it apart and swallowing it in a powerful burst of radiation.
As the victim is 'spaghettified' – or stretched out like a noodle – shocks and outflows with high temperatures become visible to telescopes in both ultraviolet and visible light.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in a low-Earth orbit since 1990, recently marked its 35th anniversary of documenting the cosmos.
Built by Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, the telescope was launched on space shuttle Discovery from NASA's Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida, to document the cosmos in a way that ground telescopes never could. Throughout its three decades of service, the observatory has transmitted endless streams of stunning cosmic images, confirmed the existence of "dark matter" and helped track a black hole moving through the Milky Way.
But the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched in 2021, far surpassed the abilities of Hubble. Orbiting the sun rather than Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is outfitted with a gold-coated mirror and powerful infrared instruments.
Also, in March 2025, NASA deployed into orbit its SPHEREx telescope to collect data on more than 450 million galaxies. Scientists say the SPHEREx observatory will be able to get a wider view of the galaxy – identifying objects of scientific interest that telescopes like Hubble and Webb can then go study up close.
Contributing: Mike Snider, USA TODAY
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [e-mail]
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: From NASA, not sci-fi horror film: Meet massive black hole Space Jaws