Astronomers were left with only a scratch on the neck: 2 million. a star brighter than the Sun has disappeared without a trace

As published by livescience.com, one of the reasons they provide is truly exceptional. They write that the giant star came out and became a black hole without the initial supernova explosion, which would actually be an “unprecedented” star … suicide.

“We probably managed to capture how one of the Universe’s largest star locations is slowly disappearing at night,” said Joseph Groh, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin, one of the authors of the new study.

“If that’s true, it could be the first time that such a giant star ends its life this way,” said colleague Andrew Allan.

This for about 75 million. The star in the constellation Aquarius was well studied in 2001-2011. The bloated light was a great example of a variable star. Such a star is nearing the end of its life and is characterized by unpredictable variability in brightness. Such stars are very rare, and only a small number have been recorded in the Universe to date.

In 2019, Allan and his colleagues hoped to take advantage of the extremely powerful telescope of the European Southern Observatory to learn more about the enigmatic evolution of a distant variable star, but they only discovered that the star seemed to have completely disappeared from its galaxy.

Usually, when a star much larger than our Sun reaches the end of its life, it becomes a large exploding star, a supernova. It is certainly impossible not to notice such an explosion, because ionized gases and powerful rays are spreading under the sky, which propagate for many light years in all directions. After an explosion, a thick cloud of material that remains after a star explosion can turn into a black hole or a neutron star. However, no such radiation was observed after the disappearance of said star. The star simply disappeared.

To solve this puzzle, scientists analyzed previous observations of this star between 2002 and 2009. They discovered that during this period the star survived a period of intense eruption and at a much faster rate than usual “spitting” on stellar matter. Scientists write that variable stars can experience many of these buds in their late temperamental age, making them shine brighter than normal. Investigators say the outbreak likely ended sometime after 2011.

This may explain why the star looked so bright in that early observation period. However, this still does not explain what happened after the outbreak and why the star disappeared. One possible explanation is that the star may have sunk considerably after the outbreak and was later covered by a thick veil of cosmic dust. If so, then this star may reappear in the future.

A stranger and much more interesting potential explanation is that this star did not recover after the outbreak, and then turned into a black hole without a supernova stage. Scientists admit that this would be a very rare phenomenon. Given the star’s supposed mass, it could have created a black hole 85-120 times larger than the mass of the Sun, although how this could have happened without the visible supernova remains an open question.