Stars Aren’t Supposed to Go Out Like This
When a massive star went missing, astronomers expected to find a supernova in its place. But there wasn’t one.
A star has gone missing.
Not in our own Milky Way, but in a galaxy about 75 million light-years away. The star in question is so hot that it glows crystal blue, and it shines a couple million times brighter than the star we know best, our sun. Even as stars go, it’s massive. Astronomers have studied it for nearly two decades, so it was pretty disconcerting when, one day last year, they looked at the latest observations and realized they couldn’t find it anymore.
Andrew Allan, a
