Hundreds of stars suddenly turned into black holes in the sky?

A group of scientists sought the truth about giant and brilliant stars that suddenly mysteriously disappeared from the sky.

According to widely accepted theory, stars have a certain lifespan and will die. It was a brilliant death - called a supernova, where the star explodes and spews its contents throughout the universe.

But, scientists have found some massive stars that disappeared without any sign of a supernova. They were clearly visible in older surveys, only to be completely lost in later surveys without a reasonable explanation.

Now, a pair of objects in a neighboring galaxy may provide the answer.

The pair of objects VFTS 243 includes a giant star and a mysterious black hole - (Photo: ESO).

According to Science Alert, the targeted pair of objects is VFTS 243 in the Large Magellanic Cloud - the satellite galaxy of the galaxy containing the Milky Way Earth.

VFTS 243 consists of a black hole and a companion star . The system showed no signs of the supernova explosion that would have accompanied the formation of a black hole.

An international research team led by astrophysicist Alejandro Vigna-Gómez from the Niels Bohr Institute (Denmark) and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Germany) has come up with the most convincing explanation: Besides death brilliant, giant stars also die suddenly.

'If a person stands looking up at such a star that is about to completely collapse, at the right moment, it can appear to suddenly turn off and disappear from the sky, ' said Dr. Vigna-Gómez.

So what do stars become after they die?

According to theory, after stars first explode into supernovae, their cores will collapse into neutron stars or white dwarfs depending on their size.

After a while, this neutron star or white dwarf may explode again , this time leaving behind only a black hole or a nebula.

According to the new model, giant stars are fully capable of "phase combustion", meaning that instead of exploding, the core - under the pressure of its own extremely strong gravity - collapses directly into a hole. dark black.

VFTS 243's black hole may have formed like this. This black hole has a mass 10 times that of the Sun, is accompanied by a 7.4 million year old star and is about 25 times the mass of the Sun.

New research has determined that these two objects went around each other in a nearly circular orbit.

That is the clearest evidence that this black hole was not pushed away from the position it existed in when it was a star by any supernova explosion.

This means that the ancient star did not necessarily explode into a supernova, but simply experienced a failed explosion . It is very possible that the rest of the star was also "cleaned up" because of this suddenly formed black hole, leaving nothing enough to observe in the sky.