We have retold 4 papers by this author. 1 of them with a full read. most often about: stellar evolution, black hole, gamma-ray burst. 24 co-authors across our retellings.
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.
The night sky looks still, but sometimes one of the stars suddenly begins to brighten. That's what happened with the system AT 2019wey: it was spotted by the TESS telescope, which usually hunts for planets around other stars, but happened to be imaging that patch of sky every half hour.
A massive star's explosion is bright but brief. The flash itself lasts weeks, but the dust it heats around it glows in infrared for years. It's like a camera flash illuminating a room, then hot dust particles lingering in the air — only on a cosmic scale.
In active galactic nuclei, supermassive black holes are surrounded by a dense ring of dust that acts like a curtain: it hides everything happening at the center. If a star ventures too close to the black hole, tidal forces tear it apart, and the resulting flare is usually visible in optical and X-ray light.