At a Glance

Astronomers were able to observe dying star turning into a black hole.The event may help explain why not all stars become supernovae when they expire.Questions remain about the origin of black holes.

A dying star 25 times the size of our sun has likely been reborn as a black hole, giving astronomers key insights into the life cycles of supernovae and black holes.

Instead of exploding in a massive supernova, the star instead fizzled out, leaving behind a black hole. Astronomers searching for the star's remains using a Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes found nothing.

"The typical view is that a star can form a black hole only after it goes supernova," said Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology. "If a star can fall short of a supernova and still make a black hole, that would help to explain why we don’t see supernovae from the most massive stars."

“Massive fails” like this one could explain why astronomers rarely see supernovae from the most massive stars, said Kochanek.

Kochanek led a team of astronomers who in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Among the galaxies they’ve been watching is NGC 6946, nicknamed the “Fireworks Galaxy” because supernovae frequently happen there. The brightness of one particular star, N6946-BH1, began to weaken in 2009 before it seemingly vanished by 2015. By process of elimination, the researchers ended up concluding that the star must have become a black hole.

This begs the question: how often do stars experience massive fails? Scott Adams, a former Ohio State student who recently earned his Ph.D. working on the project, , according to a release from the university.

“N6946-BH1 is the only likely failed supernova that we found in the first seven years of our survey. During this period, six normal supernovae have occurred within the galaxies we’ve been monitoring, suggesting that 10 to 30 percent of massive stars die as failed supernovae,” he said.

Study co-author Krzysztof Stanek, also a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, is very interested in the discovery's implications for the origins of very massive black holes. He wonders how a star could undergo a supernova and still have enough mass left over to create a black hole that size.

"I suspect it's much easier to make a very massive black hole if there is no supernova," Stanek said.

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