The star, known as M31-2014-DS1, didn’t erupt in a spectacular supernova. There was no brilliant explosion lighting up space. Instead, its core appears to have quietly collapsed under its own gravity, forming a black hole directly. By combining new telescope observations with more than a decade of archived data, a research team led by Kishalay De at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute reconstructed the most detailed timeline yet of a star undergoing this silent transformation.
The pattern was remarkable. Around 2014, the star brightened in infrared wavelengths. By 2016, its visible brightness had dropped sharply. By 2023, it had dimmed to just one ten-thousandth of its original optical luminosity — effectively vanishing. Yet in the mid-infrared, a faint glow remains, coming from dust expelled from the star’s outer layers rather than consumed entirely.
Internal convection appears to have given the outer material enough angular momentum to orbit the newly formed black hole instead of plunging straight inward, allowing it to feed slowly over decades rather than in a sudden burst.
Only about 1% of the outer envelope ultimately fell into the black hole. And this wasn’t a one-off event - a previous case, NGC 6946-BH1, showed the same behavior. Some of the universe’s most massive stars don’t explode when they die. They simply fade away into darkness.
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