Of Popular Mechanics
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A star in the dwarf galaxy PHL 293B has disappeared without a trace.
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The outsized star, a type of luminous blue variable star, shone 2.5 to 3.5 times brighter than our sun.
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Astronomers suspect it may be a case of a supernova gone wrong.
A star unit is 75 million light years from Earth. Astronomers had been observing a distant dwarf galaxy called PHL 293B when a star 2.5 million times brighter than our sun suddenly disappeared.
It is possible that the star collapsed into a black hole without first becoming a full supernova. “If true,” astrophysicist Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland said in a statement, “this would be the first direct detection of a monstrous star ending its life this way.”
Typically, at the end of a star’s life, it will become a supernova before turning into a black hole or neutron star. This violent stage is difficult to miss and can last for years. Astronomers probably would have seen the explosion.
The missing star is a strange type of star called the luminous blue variable. These strange and outsized stars are marked by violent bursts, during which they shine twice as bright as before. Luminous blue variable stars are known to be very erratic, and vary greatly in their spectra and luminosity.
Astronomers observed the luminous blue variable star frequently between 2001 and 2011, but when they trained the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile in galaxy PHL 293B in 2019, the star had simply disappeared. A review of the data collected between 2011 and 2016 revealed that it was not visible after 2011. Scientists published the puzzling data earlier this month in the Monthly notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
According to some models, the luminous blue variable star could have skipped the supernova stage and formed a slow-spinning black hole, Allan said. Gizmodo This scenario would restructure what we think about how stars live and die.
Another main suspect? Dust. Allan and his team have also suggested that the star may have been shrouded in a thick mist of gas and dust, hiding it from view. The near infrared observations taken in 2009 suggest that this cloud of gas and dust would need to be extremely cold to shade the star undetected.
This is not the first time that a star has completely disappeared without a trace. In 2017, astronomers were stunned when a giant red star 22 million light-years away in the Fireworks Galaxy suddenly disappeared. At the time, they attributed it to a supernova that went wrong.
Only time and more observations will reveal what really happened to this star. For now, the cosmic mystery remains unsolved.
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