{"id":238169,"date":"2026-06-02T02:23:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T07:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/a-giant-star-may-have-destroyed-itself-in-one-of-the-universes-rarest-explosions"},"modified":"2026-06-02T02:23:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T07:23:24","slug":"a-giant-star-may-have-destroyed-itself-in-one-of-the-universes-rarest-explosions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/a-giant-star-may-have-destroyed-itself-in-one-of-the-universes-rarest-explosions","title":{"rendered":"A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the universe\u2019s rarest explosions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-giant-star-may-have-destroyed-itself-in-one-of-the-universes-rarest-explosions.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers may have discovered one of the clearest examples yet of a rare \u201cpair-instability\u201d supernova. It is a catastrophic explosion thought to completely destroy some of the most massive stars in the universe, leaving behind no remnant. The paper outlining the properties of this rare explosion was <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2605.16487\" target=\"_blank\">posted<\/a> to the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server on May 15.<\/p>\n<p>The event, SN 2023vbw, was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in October 2023 in the outskirts of a small, metal-poor dwarf galaxy about 1.3 billion light-years away. It was tentatively classified as a Type II supernova\u2014the kind produced when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel, collapses under gravity, and explodes. But several of its properties refused to fit that picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers may have discovered one of the clearest examples yet of a rare \u201cpair-instability\u201d supernova. It is a catastrophic explosion thought to completely destroy some of the most massive stars in the universe, leaving behind no remnant. The paper outlining the properties of this rare explosion was posted to the arXiv preprint server on May [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}