The star appears to have disappeared in a failed supernova

A massive star in a nearby galaxy that has reached the end of its life appears to have disappeared rather than exploding to form a black hole in what astronomers believe is a rare way.

The most common black holes in our galaxy start out as stars. When these stars explode in a supernova, they can leave behind a black hole. But it is thought that black holes can also form from stars that fail to go supernova, instead simply collapsing under their own mass and producing a black hole directly.

In 2024, Kishalai D at Columbia University in New York and colleagues An unusually bright star It’s called M31-2014-DS1 in the nearby Andromeda galaxy and is about 20 times the mass of our Sun. The star appeared brighter briefly in 2014, before becoming significantly dimmer between 2017 and 2020. Dee and his colleagues thought this pattern of brightening and then fading was consistent with expectations for a failed supernova producing a black hole, but there was no sign of the black hole itself, such as X-rays.

Now, Dee and his team have observed M31-2014-DS1 with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra This fits with what astronomers believe that a failed supernova would look like a black hole. Dee and his team declined to comment for this story because their research has not yet been peer-reviewed.

In a separate study analyzing the same data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Emma Besor She and her colleagues at Liverpool John Morris University in the UK found that the case of M31-2014-DS1 undergoing a supernova failure that produced a black hole was even more mysterious, and that the observations could just as easily be the result of two stars merging, which could also produce a small explosion followed by blackout and lots of dust.

“Expectations of what a failed supernova looks like overlap significantly with what we would expect from two stars colliding and producing large amounts of dust,” Besor says.

However, both scenarios would still be strange phenomena, she says. “We don’t see stars that fade noticeably very often.”

“In both interpretations, this is exciting,” he says. “The visible star has already disappeared.” Gerard Gilmore At Cambridge University. “For many years, searches for disappearing massive stars have yielded mysterious results. Now, the full power of multi-wavelength time-domain astronomy is making progress.”

The only sure way to determine whether a black hole has formed is to identify X-ray radiation, which cannot currently be seen at the location of M31-2014-DS1. However, being able to study the effects of a faint star using a powerful telescope like the James Webb Space Telescope will allow us to find out what happened, he says. “We’re about to discover at least one of the final fates of massive stars, which is an entertaining take on the Cheshire Cat.”

References: arXiv, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.0577 and doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.05317

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