In 2008, a huge red star in another galaxy reached the end of its life. A star as heavy as this one, born with 25 times the mass of the Sun, was supposed to go out in a fiery flash of light known as a supernova, millions or billions of times brighter than our Sun. But this one refused to play the role of drama queen. Instead, it brightened just a little, then vanished, possibly leaving behind a black hole.<\/p>\n
No one had ever seen one of these huge red stars wink out of existence with so little fuss before. It was a sign that the lives and deaths of these stars are more complex than our simplest theories had claimed. \u201cAs amazing and important and fun and exciting as this is, it\u2019s not a surprise,\u201d says Stan Woosley at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In fact, the discovery may help explain why the massive stars in computer models often fail to blow up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2008, a huge red star in another galaxy reached the end of its life. A star as heavy as this one, born with 25 times the mass of the Sun, was supposed to go out in a fiery flash of light known as a supernova, millions or billions of times brighter than our Sun. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247234","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}