The Quiet Death of a Star ⚡ экспресс
In the Andromeda Galaxy, a star suddenly vanished, leaving behind a black hole. The James Webb infrared telescope revealed that the remnant is shrouded in an expanding shell of gas and dust the size of the Solar System, and its brightness keeps fading. The Chandra X-ray telescope detected no radiation, indicating extremely inefficient 'feeding' of the black hole on stellar debris. It seems we are witnessing for the first time a massive star quietly collapsing without a loud explosion, as if sinking into darkness.
In 2014, astronomers spotted a massive yellow star in the Andromeda galaxy. By 2022, it had vanished without a trace — without the usual blinding explosion of a supernova. It was as if someone simply switched off the light. Scientists suspected that the star's core quietly collapsed into a black hole, but the mystery was only solved with the latest instruments.
Thermal images from James Webb and the Chandra X-ray telescope revealed a ghostly scene. In place of the star, a dim reddish object is shrouded in a shell of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. This gas, expanding at 100 km/s, hides the central source, and the dust cloud stretches across 40–200 Earth-Sun distances — far beyond the orbit of Pluto.
The whole picture points to an incredibly weak explosion: the star didn't boom, it exhaled its outer layers before the core collapsed inward. The energy of this outburst was hundreds of times less than a typical supernova — true cosmic silence. Now the black hole barely glows (its brightness dropped to 7% of the original, and there's almost no X-ray emission) and only lazily pulls in the remaining matter. That's how some massive stars disappear without fireworks — turning into a cosmic shadow.
🎯 The cloud of this stellar 'soot' would swallow the entire Solar System with room to spare: its size is hundreds of times larger than Pluto's orbit — a true invisible smog around the newborn [tag:black_hole]black hole[/tag].