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.
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We’ve seen stars disappear before (presumably forming black holes), but this is by far the clearest and most detailed observed example. It strongly confirms the theory of “failed supernovae,” where sufficiently massive stars collapse directly into black holes without a bright explosion. This implies the universe likely contains far more stellar-mass black holes than previously estimated.
As an amateur, I briefly thought that this could help us address the issue of dark matter but from what I gather - no. Even with this increase of black holes the new matter would not be even close to addressing the dark matter gap (like orders of magnitude off still)
TL;DR: confirms that the universe has more stellar-mass black holes than thought but nothing major of it.
Maybe it’s just sleeping
It’s like it just gave up being a star.
I was really hoping for a time lapse of images, or at least the data that was collected being presented in a clear image. All I see on their is renderings. The video that is there could have been a .gif.
I wish the article had more details about why they’re convinced it’s a black hole and not a neutron star.
They do say it could be either (once), but then only refer to it as having turned into a black hole through the rest of the article.
Woah
