Their research was guided by a prediction from the 1970s: if a star collapses directly into a black hole, it should briefly glow in infrared light as it sheds its outer layers and becomes wrapped in ...

In 2014, a NASA telescope observed that the infrared light emitted by a massive star in the Andromeda galaxy gradually grew brighter. The star glowed more intensely with infrared light for around ...

Mira A is in the late stages of its life, a red giant swelling and losing mass as it prepares to fade into a white dwarf. While stars of this type routinely shed material, the sheer scale and symmetry ...

A massive star 2.5 million light-years away simply vanished — and astronomers now know why. Instead of exploding in a supernova, it quietly collapsed into a black hole, shedding its outer layers in a ...

"The most likely explanation for the dimming is a brown dwarf – an object heavier than a planet but lighter than a star – surrounded by a vast and dense ring system." ...

Astronomers watching the Andromeda Galaxy have now seen something they had only theorized before: a massive star that simply vanished, apparently collapsing straight into a black hole instead of ...

A dazzling new Hubble image peels back the layers of the mysterious Egg Nebula, a rare and fleeting phase in a Sun-like star’s death just 1,000 light-years away. Hidden inside a dense cocoon of dust, ...

In my January 23, 2026, “The Universe” column, I wrote about some of the biggest bangs the universe has to offer: exploding stars, hiccupping magnetars, stellar disruptions and colliding black holes.

Astronomers tracked a star in Andromeda as it dimmed and vanished without the usual fiery explosion, offering rare clues to how black holes form.

The team discovered the star by analyzing archival data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission. They used a prediction from the 1970s that theorized that when a star underwent direct collapse, it would leave ...

A “disappearing” star in the Andromeda galaxy is the closest and best candidate for a newborn black hole that astronomers have ever seen ...

Astronomers have watched a dying star fail to explode as a supernova, instead collapsing into a black hole. The remarkable sighting is the most complete observational record ever made of a star's ...