Stars live for billions of years, which means you might think looking up at the night sky would reveal a constant, never-changing tableau. However, astronomers say that isn’t the case and hundreds of stars have simply vanished, never going through the throes of supernova. They just disappeared.
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00:04 Stars live for billions of years, which means you might think looking up at the night sky
00:08 would reveal a constant, never-changing tableau. However, astronomers say that isn't the case,
00:13 and hundreds of stars have simply vanished, never going through the throes of supernova.
00:17 They just disappeared. Now experts say they might have finally figured out why.
00:21 The researchers say they have been observing a binary system called VFTS 243,
00:26 which includes a star and a companion black hole. VFTS 243's star is around 25 times the mass of the sun,
00:33 with its companion black hole just 10 times the mass of our solar system's host star.
00:37 Usually a star's supernova leads to the formation of a black hole.
00:41 However, in this system, astronomers haven't been able to detect any signs of that energetic event,
00:46 meaning the star collapse may have happened in such a way that it went straight from star to black hole with but a whimper.
00:52 With the astronomers explaining, "The collapse is so complete that no explosion occurs,
00:57 nothing escapes, and one wouldn't see any bright supernova in the sky."
01:01 With the researchers adding that they can't be sure this is what's happening with the other disappearing stars.
01:05 But these observations sure seem to point to that theory being true.
01:10 [Music]