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Scientists have discovered strong evidence that some Huge stars They end their existence with a groan, not a bang, and sink in Black hole Who made them without light and fury a Supernova.
To understand why this is important, we must start with a crash course in stellar evolution. Stars generate energy through… Nuclear fusion The processes taking place in its core through which hydrogen is converted into helium. When stars with at least eight times The mass of our sun When the hydrogen supply runs out, fusion reactions involving other elements begin instead – helium, carbon, oxygen, etc., until they end up with an inert iron nucleus that requires more energy than can be put into the fusion reaction it produces. At this point, the fusion reactions stop, and the energy production carrying the star evaporates. Suddenly, gravity took over and caused the core to collapse, while the star’s outer layers bounced off the shrinking core and exploded outward, creating a supernova that can sometimes shine brighter than an entire star for a few weeks. galaxy.
At the same time, the collapsed core forms a compact body. This object is often rotating Neutron star It is called b Pulsar – But under certain conditions, it could be a stellar-mass black hole. This is the standard story for astral timelines. However, astronomers are now starting to come up with the idea that some stars that produce black holes might do so without Supernova explosion.
Related: One of the most “extreme” dead stars in the universe has unexpectedly returned to life
Researchers have occasionally observed the occurrence Failed supernovae – Stars that start out bright as if they are about to explode, but then falter and die. Elsewhere, studies of ancient photographic plates as part of The vanishing and appearing of objects over a century of observations The VASCO project, led by Beatriz Villarroel, found dozens of stars on these ancient paintings that are no longer seen; It’s as if they disappeared without a trace.
Could these failed supernovae and vanishing stars be evidence that stars are almost completely attracted to the black hole they form before they have a chance to explode? Well, some scientists might think so.
“If someone stood staring at a visible star undergoing complete collapse, it could be, in time, like watching a star suddenly extinguish and disappear from the sky,” said Alejandro Vigna Gomez of the Max Planck Institute. For astrophysics in Germany in A statement. “Astronomers have actually observed the sudden disappearance of bright stars recently.”
Although the idea is still just a theory, it now has strong supporting evidence in the form of an exotic binary system studied by Vigna Gomez and his team. The system was designated VFTS 243 It was discovered in 2022 It is found in the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in… Large Magellanic Cloud; It contains a star with a mass of 25 solar masses and a black hole with a mass of 10 solar masses, which must have been produced by a massive star that reached the end of its life relatively recently, in cosmological terms.
“VFTS 243 is an exceptional system,” Vigna-Gomez said. “Despite the fact that VFTS 243 contains a star that collapsed into a black hole, no traces of an explosion have been found anywhere.”
For example, the orbits of the star and black hole in VFTS 243, around their common center of mass, are still nearly circular. However, supernova explosions are asymmetric, with slightly more energy being produced in one direction than in the other, which should give the compact body that forms it a “birth kick.” Such a kick would accelerate the compact object, causing its orbit to expand and elongate further. Normally, the speed of this kick is between 30 and 100 kilometers (19 and 62 miles) per second, however, the black hole in VFTS 243 was kicked, at most, by only four kilometers (2.5 miles) per second.
The consequences of birth kicks have been observed before in pulsars, but never before in stellar-mass black holes. This very likely tells us something about how stellar-mass black holes form, and VFTS 243 is the clearest look yet at the results of this process.
Birth kicks are the product of three things: the expulsion of debris from the exploding star, an explosion Neutrinos From the heart of a collapsing star, and Gravitational waves. However, if there was no supernova, there would be no debris, leaving only neutrinos and gravitational waves to provide a much smaller kick – which is exactly what we see in VFTS 243.
If this is true, it would mean that many of the most massive stars in the universe, which shine most intensely, end their lives in silent darkness as they are sucked into black hole oblivion. This may also be the final fate of the surviving star of VFTS 243 when it reaches the end of its life.
There are also broader implications. A supernova explosion is an element factory. It’s not just elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen that are found in the outer layers of the dying star space Since they can be recycled into the next generation of stars and planets, the intense heat and energy of the supernova’s shock wave can create heavier elements in the supernova debris. For example, one reason supernovae shine for so long is that radioactive decay of nickel isotopes from the explosion leads to the formation of cobalt and iron.
However, if some massive stars completely collapse into black holes without supernova explosions, they cannot contribute to creating and recycling elements. Thus, cosmochemists will need to factor this concept, if indeed it is correct, into their models of how elements form and spread through space. Only then can they begin to fully understand the chemical evolution of galaxies, including our own, and how rapidly the elements needed to form planets such as… LandPerhaps even with a life of their own made up of elements produced by exploding stars, they could accrete.
The results of VFTS 243 were published May 9 in the journal Physical review letters.
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