In the other scenario, the eruption could have been the star's death throes, ending abruptly at some point after 2011 as the star collapsed into a black hole.

The star's mysterious disappearance could hint at a new type of stellar death. You will receive a verification email shortly. Once again, no star. The star in question, located about 75 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was well studied between 2001 and 2011. These stars are massive - on the supergiant or hypergiant scale - and at the end of their lives. Even as stars go, it’s massive. Not in our own Milky Way, but in a galaxy about 75 million light-years away.

30 June 2020. Now, in a new paper published today (June 30) in the journal Monthly … When a massive star went missing, astronomers expected to find a supernova in its place. But those traces had vanished. Allan said that astronomers will soon deploy the Hubble space telescope, one of humankind’s finest eyes on the sky, to take a look. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. The researchers haven’t ruled out slightly less dramatic possibilities. Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe. That’s at least one explanation for the apparent disappearance of a star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun in a dwarf galaxy 75 million light years away. So when the team turned all four of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope optical telescopes towards PHL 293B in August 2019, the absence was shocking. The bloated orb was a superb example of a luminous blue variable (LBV) — a massive star approaching the end of its life and prone to unpredictable variations in brightness. An unusually bright star has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions. Still another explanation, put forth by a different team of astronomers in their own study of this distant galaxy this year, suggests that the star, missing or not, isn’t a star at all. Who lies in the tomb of the 'Six-Headed Chief'? The data suggest that the star might have dimmed after an especially luminous period. It's impossible to know for certain with the current data. The missing LBV left no such radiation. Stay up to date on the coronavirus outbreak by signing up to our newsletter today. Outer space certainly can be a mysterious and surprising realm, but stars like this one aren’t supposed to blink out without a trace. Near-infrared observations between 2009 and 2019 ruled out a cloud of hot dust, but mid-infrared observations that could confirm or rule out cooler dust are yet to be taken, so this scenario is still very much on the table. Is this the funniest animal picture ever? Receive news and offers from our other brands? Somehow, after 2011, the star vanished without a trace. The observations revealed no evidence of a supernova—and that, to Allan, is the best part. He’s still not sure what happened: Massive stars aren’t supposed to survive their supernova. Astronomers have theorized that a star could go out this way, and they have come close to capturing it. Read: Astronomers glimpse a luminous object born from a star’s death. But i did witness seeing this star dissappear. From this point, there are two main possibilities. We want to hear what you think about this article. But there wasn’t one. In 2009, a star appeared to brighten, a sign that it might soon explode, in a galaxy so well known for stellar explosions that it is nicknamed the “fireworks galaxy.” For several months, the star glowed 1 million times more luminous than our sun. When even the most powerful space-based telescopes couldn’t find it, astronomers concluded that it had fizzled out into a black hole without experiencing that final spark.

This would be a rare event, the team conceded. Artist's impression of a luminous blue variable star. Of all the things you'd expect to lose sight of, a star 100 times bigger than our sun probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. (Sometimes, this looks downright beautiful.) Luminous blue stars are quite moody, prone to dramatic shifts in brightness.
In 2019, scientists witnessed a massive star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun disappear without a trace. Maybe, Allan thought, this was Earth’s fault.

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The star in question is so hot that it glows crystal blue, and it shines a couple million times brighter than the star we know best, our sun. All Rights Reserved. Visit our corporate site. Not in our own Milky Way, but in a galaxy about 75 million light-years away. "We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local universe going gently into the night," Jose Groh, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin and a co-author of a new paper on the star, said in a statement.

In this scenario, the star could have continued erupting behind its cloud of dust - we just can't see it any more because, well, cloud of dust. Hey i want to say i witnessed a star dissappear into nothing on May 03, 2019 between 4:15 am 4:30 am pst right before i left for work.

Then the mystery deepened. A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Arcavi came upon a star that had exploded over and over again, instead of fading into the darkness after a single radiant blast. The outburst likely ended sometime after 2011, the team said.

Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. In this scenario, the disappearing act was helped along by another astrophysical phenomenon; in a quirk of timing, a cloud of cosmic dust might have moved right in front of the star at about the same time, blocking its already-subdued shine so that the star became completely hidden from our view.

If this were the case, then the star could reappear in future observations. And there's a really exciting possibility - that the star collapsed down into a black hole, without the supernova that has previously been thought a necessary component of such events. To investigate this mystery further, astronomers will need to collect more observations of the distant galaxy. When I asked Allan about this discovery, which was announced yesterday, I had expected some alarm in his response, maybe even a hint of panic, over an apparent cosmic disappearance. Of these, one twist ending stands out: Perhaps, the researchers wrote, the massive star died and collapsed into a black hole without undergoing a supernova explosion first — a truly "unprecedented" act of stellar suicide. DNA reveals clues. The star, in the very late stages of its lifespan, was shining brightly between 2001 and 2011, when different teams of astronomers were regularly observing it to … Massive stars aren't like your car keys. LUCKY THING YOU!!!! At the …

It simply disappeared. Scientists have been observing the star for decades as … According to this group, telescopes have been observing, all this time, the light of a long-lived supernova interacting with cosmic material around it. It is univeral. There was a problem. Image caption. But by 2015, it had vanished instead.

"If true," said astrophysicist Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, "this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner.". It's a little hard to figure out exactly what happened, though. This could explain why the star appeared so bright during those early observations — still, it does not explain what happened after the outburst that caused the star to vanish. The first is that the star grew slightly dimmer, and became shrouded in a cloud of dust as it ejected material into the space around it - much like the dust cloud that may (or may not) have obscured Milky Way's red giant star Betelgeuse earlier this year. As such, they are extremely bright and unstable, and their light can vary dramatically in both brightness and spectrum as they undergo outbursts and eruptions. Please refresh the page and try again.

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