Scientists have shared the clearest evidence ever of a star collapsing into a black hole, with one astronomy professor hailing it as the ‘most surprising discovery’ of his life.
The star, named M31-2014-DS1, was located around 2.5 million light-years from Earth and had a mass around 13 times that of the Sun.
It had been thought that stars of that size would explode as a supernova before becoming a black hole.
However, this newly found evidence appears to show this particular star having a ‘direct collapse’ to become a black hole.
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The star turned into a black hole, without becoming a supernova
Scientists have believed for some time that stars can become black holes without passing through the supernova stage, but finding evidence to back that up has proved a little more difficult.
But now, researchers from Columbia University have shared the clearest ever images of a star going through ‘direct collapse’ and turning into a black hole without exploding into a supernova.
Science Channel
Astronomers say the way in which it became a black hole suggests that at the end of its life, the inner core wasn’t pushed out in a typical supernova explosion, but instead it had an inward collapse.
Although once 13 times the mass of the Sun, powerful solar winds had stripped a lot of that weight during its life, so that at the time of its death, M31-2014-DS1 was around five times the mass of the Sun.
“The dramatic and sustained fading of this star is very unusual, and suggests a supernova failed to occur, leading to the collapse of the star’s core directly into a black hole,” Columbia University astronomy professor Kishalay De said.
“Stars with this mass have long been assumed to always explode as supernovae.
“The fact that it didn’t suggests that stars with the same mass may or may not successfully explode, possibly due to how gravity, gas pressure, and powerful shock waves interact in chaotic ways with each other inside the dying star.”
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The images were taken more than a decade ago, but had remained unnoticed until now
The new findings have been published in the journal Science this month, but the images on which the findings are based are actually more than a decade old.
In 2014, a NASA telescope observed an infrared light coming from the M31-2014-DS1 in the Andromeda galaxy that continued to grow brighter.
The glow intensified for around three years before it dramatically vanished, leaving behind a dust shell.
NASA/Kishalay De et al
These images went unnoticed until the team at Columbia University took a closer look and realized what they’d found.
“This has probably been the most surprising discovery of my life,” De said.
“The evidence of the disappearance of the star was lying in public archival data and nobody noticed for years until we picked it out.”
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