Scientists have found a star unlike any other one recorded—which may change our understanding of how stars die.

This unusual star, 13,000 light-years away, has an elemental makeup that suggests it was formed in the aftermath of a more massive star exploding in a way that no existing theory seems to explain. According to everything else we know, the original star should have turned into a black hole instead.

The discovery may rearrange our picture of how stars explode and how some of the heavier elements are made. It also helps us better understand what the first generation of stars in the universe may have looked like.

How is a black hole formed? In the simplest language, a black hole is born when a star dies. Now, astronomers have claimed that they might have just witnessed the birth of such a black hole in a major first. This is huge for the scientific community worldwide as it directly links the death of a star to the formation of a black hole-like compact object.

“Our research is like solving a puzzle by gathering all possible evidence,” Ping Chen, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and lead author of a study published in Nature, was quoted as saying by Cosomos Magazine.

It started with the discovery of a super bright object in space, called SN 2022jli. The object, located some 76 million years away, was discovered by a South African amateur astronomer, Berto Monard. Soon it was confirmed that they had their eyes set on a supernova. A supernova occurs just as a star is breathing its last, or when a black hole is about to form.

Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions.

The name was suggested by the 5-year-old daughter of one of the researchers in the group and is due to the diffuse appearance of the object. Its surface brightness is to faint that it had passed unnoticed in the various previous surveys of this part of the sky due to the object’s diffuse appearance as if it were some kind of ghost. This is because its stars are so spread out in such a large volume that “Nube” (Spanish for “Cloud”) was almost undetectable.

This newly discovered galaxy has a set of specific properties which distinguish it from previously known objects. The research team estimate that Nube is a dwarf galaxy 10 times fainter than others of its type, but also 10 times more extended than other objects with a comparable number of stars.

After a decade studying thousands of supernovae, astronomers are still perplexed by the enigma that led Einstein to his ‘greatest mistake’

The problem is known as the Hubble tension, and it centers around figuring out a number for the universe’s expansion rate, called the Hubble constant. To find it, scientists have pored over tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — an ancient relic of the universe’s first light — and built cosmic distance ladders to remote, pulsating stars called Cepheid variables.

But the best experiments using these two methods disagree. The difference in results may have seemed small, but it was enough to spark a major crisis in cosmology.

Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, has spent four decades studying the Hubble constant.