Black hole shredded a “super sun” with 400 billion times the Sun’s energy and something strange appeared in the aftermath, a dense helium cloud racing toward Earth at over 3,700 miles per second as if part of the star had survived

A black hole shredded a star, releasing 400 billion times the Sun’s energy

A black hole doesn’t always swallow a star whole. Sometimes, astronomers say, it tears one apart gradually — pulling off material piece by piece, like “preparing a snack for lunch.”

That’s what researchers believe happened when a massive star, many times larger than our Sun, was shredded by a black hole in one of the most energetic cosmic events ever recorded. For a brief window, the destruction released roughly 400 billion times the energy of the Sun. The event, formally designated AT2024wpp and nicknamed “the Whippet,” was rare enough to stop astronomers cold. What they found in the months that followed was stranger still.

A star torn apart, one piece at a time

The Whippet was first spotted by Anna Ho, an assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. The object was formally designated AT2024wpp — and it quickly raised flags.

Researchers suspected they were looking at a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient, or LFBOT. These are rare, poorly understood cosmic events tied to the violent destruction of stars. Within a single day, observations from the Liverpool Telescope in the Canary Islands and NASA’s Swift satellite confirmed the suspicion: the object was intensely blue and pumping out X-rays.

Lead researcher Daniel Perley, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University, described what likely happened. “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,” he said. Material stripped from the star spiraled inward, growing superheated as it fell. The star wasn’t swallowed whole — consumed gradually instead, its mass feeding the black hole across time.

The most energetic explosion ever powered by a black hole

For a brief window, the Whippet outshone almost everything astronomers have ever recorded. The energy output reached roughly 400 billion times that of Earth’s Sun — a figure that surpasses even the most powerful supernovae ever observed.

Distance measurements provided by coauthors R. Michael Rich at UCLA and Yu-Jing Qin at Caltech helped confirm the scale. The transient wasn’t just bright because it was close. It was genuinely, extraordinarily energetic.

The object’s exceptionally high temperature also played a key role in ruling out alternative explanations. Combined with the distance data and X-ray output, the evidence pointed clearly toward a star being ripped apart by a black hole’s gravity. “This was many times more energetic than any similar event,” Perley said, “and more than any known explosion powered by the collapse of a star.”

A shock wave that raced — then fizzled

The destruction didn’t stop at the black hole’s edge. It sent a powerful shock wave racing outward through dense surrounding gas at one-fifth the speed of light — roughly 37,000 miles per second. For months, that wave tore through material the star had previously expelled.

Then, after about six months, the shock wave appeared to simply stop. Not a gradual slowdown. It fizzled.

Researchers believe it hit the outer boundary of a bubble — a shell of gas the doomed star had shed before its final destruction. Once the shock reached that boundary, it had nowhere left to go. Meanwhile, material spiraling into the black hole’s disk generated an intense wind of gas and X-ray radiation, colliding with surrounding material and producing the bright blue and ultraviolet light astronomers saw in the event’s earliest days.

The strange signal no one expected

Here’s where the story takes an unexpected turn. During the first month after the explosion, observations from Keck Observatory, Magellan Observatory, and the Very Large Telescope showed nothing unusual in the chemical signatures — or rather, no recognizable signatures at all.

As the event began to fade, something appeared. Weak signals of hydrogen and helium emerged from the data. The helium was moving toward Earth at more than 6,000 kilometers per second — over 3,700 miles per second.

That speed matters. It suggests a densely bound structure may have survived the initial blast intact and was now hurtling in our direction. Researchers have two possible explanations, neither confirmed. The signal could come from a stream of material released by the star’s core as the black hole tore it apart — or, more speculatively, from a third body in the system, a companion object being irradiated by the black hole’s powerful outflow of particles and X-rays. Both possibilities point to something that shouldn’t, by most expectations, still be there.

What the Whippet reveals about black holes

The Whippet isn’t just a record-breaker. It’s a window. Events like this give astronomers a rare opportunity to watch a black hole feed in real time and study the mechanics of how that feeding actually works. “Not only do these events help us identify black holes,” Perley noted, “they provide a new way to identify where black holes occur and how they form and grow.”

How a black hole consumes a massive companion star is still not fully understood. The Whippet, described in a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and presented at the AAS conference in Phoenix, Arizona, offers one of the clearest looks yet.

What lingers, though, is the helium. A star was torn apart with almost incomprehensible force — and something may have come through it anyway. That possibility quietly reframes how we think about destruction at cosmic scales. Not everything that enters a black hole’s grip disappears without a trace. Sometimes the aftermath leaves a signal racing toward us, asking to be understood.

You can check the full version of the study here: Perley, D. A., Ho, A. Y., McGrath, Z., Camilo, M., Sevilla, C., Chen, P., … & Young, D. R. (2026). AT 2024wpp: an extremely luminous fast ultraviolet transient powered by accretion onto a black hole. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 549(1), stag678.