Astronomers witness vanishing star collapse into a black hole in Andromeda galaxy
Astronomers may have witnessed the birth of a brand-new black hole in our neighboring galaxy, offering one of the clearest glimpses yet of how some stars quietly collapse into these cosmic abysses without the usual fireworks of an explosion.
While scouring archival data from NASA's NEOWISE mission, a team led by Columbia University astronomer Kishalay De discovered that one of the brightest stars in the Andromeda Galaxy mysteriously brightened over a decade ago, faded dramatically and then vanished from view. The star, labeled M31-2014-DS1, lay about 2.5 million light-years from Earth and weighed just 13 times the mass of our sun — relatively lightweight by typical black hole-forming standards, according to De and colleagues' research.
"Observations like these are starting to finally change this long-held paradigm that it's only the very massive stars that turn into black holes
If this detection holds up, he added, "then it really means that there are many more black holes out there than what we've anticipated so far."
Before it vanished, the star shone roughly 100,000 times brighter than our sun. De likened its prominence to Betelgeuse, a well-studied red supergiant that marks the right shoulder of the constellation Orion.
If Betelgeuse were to fade from the sky over a few years, De said, "that would really be shocking and disturbing for us here on Earth, because suddenly Orion wouldn't look the way it does."
De and his team first noticed M31-2014-DS1's strange behavior in data from the NEOWISE mission. Around 2014, the team's new paper reports, the star brightened in infrared light, then began dimming sharply in 2016, and by 2023 had effectively vanished — fading to roughly one ten-thousandth of its original brightness.
De said he was sitting in front of a computer at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii in 2023, collecting follow-up observations of the star when he noticed something did not add up.
"I remember the moment when we pointed the telescope towards this star — except the star was not there at all," he recalled. Additional observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and other ground-based observatories confirmed that the star was truly gone. "That's when it clicked," De said. "Stars that are this bright, this massive, do not just randomly disappear into darkness."
According to a leading theory, black holes form when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, triggering an explosive supernova that blasts the star's outer layers into space that leaves behind either a dense neutron star or a black hole. M31-2014-DS1, however, appears to have formed a black hole without any such fireworks.
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