Failed Supernova? How a Massive Star Quietly Became a Black Hole

Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.

I want you to try a little thought experiment with me. It's a bit of a terrifying one, but just just bear.

With me for a second, Okay, I'm with you.

Imagine you're standing out in a field. It's a clear night, the air is cold and crisp, maybe it's winter, and you're looking up at the constellation Oriyan the Hunter, you know, the one, three stars for the belt, the sword hanging down, and that big angry red start to shoulder Beetlegeez.

Can't miss it, exactly.

It's a fixture. It's been in our story since we started writing things down. It's a cosmic landmark, an anchor for humanity. Really. Now, I want you to keep your eyes on that red dot. Don't blink, just watch it. And then suddenly the light just cuts out. No explosion, no beautiful expanding cloud of gas, none of that supernova stuff that turns night into day for a few weeks. It's just it's there, and then it's not a hole in the sky, a hole in I don't know.

In reality, it gives you a physical reaction just thinking about it. Yeah, it's unnerving.

It is, isn't it. It feels fundamentally wrong. Everything we know about physics tells us that energy doesn't just disappear, you know, massive objects don't just vanish into thin air. If beetle Jews winked out of existence tonight, the panic wouldn't just be among astronomers, it would be existential. We feel like the universe just glitched, like a pixel in the simulation just went dead.

It would absolutely challenge our very deep seated comfort with the permanence of the cosmos. I mean, we rely on the violent deaths of stars on supernovae to explain so much about well, about us, where the elements came from. But silence, silence is just is spooky.

And yet silence is exactly what we're here to talk about today. Because this whole scenario, this impossible, terrifying, vanishing act, it's not hypothetical anymore. It actually happened.

It did in a galaxy not so far away.

It didn't happen to Beatlecheos, thank goodness for the sake of our night sky. But it happened to our next door neighbor. We're looking at a report that was released just yesterday, February twelfth, twenty twenty six. It was published in Science magazine with support from the Simonce Foundation, and it details the life and the very very sudden death of a star with well the distinctly unromantic name of M thirty one twenty fourteen DS.

One, a name only a cataloger could love, for sure exactly.

But you shouldn't let that barcode of a name fool you. This star is at the very center of a mystery that's been I mean, it's been nagging astrophysicists for decades.

It is.

We are talking about the case of the failed super nova.

Which is a term that I think for most people just sounds like a complete oxy moron, a contradiction in term.

It really does. When I hear supernova, my brain immediately goes to the most violent, explosive, ridiculously over the top event imaginable so how does one fail? Did it just trip over its own shoelaces on the way to the explosion in a.

Way that's not a bad analogy. Kind of did, But the consequences of that trip are, well, they're just fascinating. What we're really discussing today is the clearest, most unambiguous observation humanity has ever made of a massive star collapsing directly into a black hole with no bang, no bang, no fireworks, just a star that got too heavy, gave up the ghosts, and crushed itself completely out of existence.

So this report is essentially the autopsy of a silent death. And what's really incredible to me is the detective work involved here. I mean, we're talking about spotting a single star blinking out in a galaxy that contains a trillion stars, Yeah, located millions of light years away.

It's the ultimate neil in a haystack. Yeah, except in this case, the needle suddenly decides to become invisible.

Right, So today let's just walk through this whole investigation. We're gonna look at the victim, this star M thirty one twenty fourteen DS one. We're gonna look at the murder weapon, gravity, and then we have to look at the alibi, this new idea of stellar convection that explains why the star didn't just vanish instantly, but actually left behind this this ghostly fingerprint, and.

That fingerprint, that a little bit of leftover glow. That's the key to the whole thing. It challenges a lot of our basic assumptions about how black holes are even born.

Okay, so before we get into the you know, the nitty gritty physics at the collapse, let's just set the scene. We need to go to the Andromeda galaxy M.

Thirty one, our big sister galaxy.

Right, It's about two and a half million light years away, And I feel like we just gloss over that number way too often. When we say this star vanished in twenty sixteen, we.

I mean the lights stopped arriving here in twenty.

Sixteen, exactly. The actual event, the death of the star happened two and a half million years ago.

Yeah, and Homo habilist was just sort of figuring out the whole stone tools thing on Earth. This star was already dying. We were watching a very very old cosmic rerun.

That time delay always messes with my head okay, but let's talk about the star itself. M thirty one twenty fourteen DS one. This wasn't some minor player, was it. This was a big deal.

Oh no, this was an absolute heavyweight. The paper categorizes it as a massive star, but more specifically, we're looking at something in the neighborhood of twenty solar.

Masses twenty times the mass of our.

Sun, twenty times, And in astrophysics, mass is destiny. There's no escaping it.

It's everything.

It is entirely destiny. A star like our Sun. It'll die pretty gently, it'll puff off its outer layers, it'll become a white dwarf. It's a quiet retirement. But when you get above say, eight, maybe ten times the mass of the Sun, you enter a totally different realm, the realm of violent deaths.

These are the rock stars at the galaxy.

They absolutely are. They live fast, they burn incredibly bright, and they die young and spectacular, and.

Usually they die loud, very very loud.

Usually, and M thirty one twenty fourteen DS one was one of the most luminous stars in the entire Andromeda Galaxy. If you were an astronomer observing M thirty one this star was it was basically shouting its presence at you. It was shining with the intensity of tens of thousands of our suns a real beacon.

Okay, so it's a cosmic lighthouse, and it's twenty fourteen. The light from the star is hitting our telescopes. But it wasn't just any telescope watching it, was it. This is where the detective story gets really interesting. The main data came from a project called NEOWISE.

Right, and Neo WISE is a fascinating instrument in and of itself. It's a space telescope from NASA. Originally its name was just WISE, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, and its whole job was to map the entire sky in infrared.

Light, so in heat radiation.

Basically exactly, it's seeing what our eyes can't. It's seeing the thermal glow of the universe. YE Now WISE ran out of its primary coolant years ago, which normally is a death sentence for an infrared telescope, but NASA very cleverly repurposed it realize it could still be used to hunt for near Earth objects, asteroids, comments that sort of thing. Hence the new name NEOWISE.

So Its main job is hunting for asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth.

Primarily. Yes, it sweeps the sky over and over and over again, and it's looking for things that move or things that change brightness against the static background of stars. But here's the beautiful unintended consequence. Because it scans the entire sky repeatedly, it advertently created this massive time lapse movie of the universe. Wow, it wasn't specifically looking for a dying star in Andromeda. It just happened to be looking everywhere all the time.

That's the real beauty of big data, isn't it. You end up catching things you weren't even fishing for. So this team, led by a researcher named Kishal A d they're digging through all this archival neowise data. What did they find? What's the timeline?

So think construct what's called a light curve, which is really just a graph of the star's brightness over time. And from about twenty five to twenty thirteen, the star's pretty I mean, it's a massive bright object just doing its thing. But in twenty fourteen, its behavior.

Starts to change, It starts to get brighter.

It does specifically in the mid in for read bands, the star starts to glow more intensely. It's a definite uptick. You can think of it like a fever. The star is becoming unstable. It's sick.

Is that unusual for a star that big? I thought they were kind of all little anyway.

They are. That's a great point. Massive stars are notoriously cranky. They burp, they flare, they pulsate, So a little brightening on its own wouldn't be a huge red flag. But this brightening, it continued and it intensified until about twenty sixteen, and that is when the event happened, the vanishing act, the collapse. Between twenty sixteen and about twenty nineteen, the

Okay. I want to clarify the terms here because the report makes a big deal about distinguishing between near and red and mid infrared. Why does that distinction matter so much?

It's absolutely crucial to understanding the mystery. So near for red, is a wavelength that's very close to the visible red light our eyes can see. It's the kind of light that a very hot object like the surface of a star emits. Meat Infrared, on the other hand, is a much longer wavelength. It represents cooler temperatures. Think warm dust. Essentially, got it.

So near infrared equals hot star. Mid infrared equals warm dust.

That's the perfect mental shorthand. So in twenty sixteen, the hot star signal that's the visible light in the nearer infrared, it just switches off. It drops by a factor of ten.

Thousand, ten thousand. That's not dimming, that's just it's gone.

It went from being a stadium flood light to a single candle flame in the middle of a hurricane. By twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, for all intents and purposes, the star was no more.

You know, if I were an astronomer looking at that data for the first time, my first thought wouldn't be, oh, a black hole formed. My first thought would be did my telescope break.

Or did satellite fly in front of the lens right?

Or did a big cloud of space dust just drift in front of it?

And the team had to rule out every single one of those possibilities. They checked for instrumental errors. They checked for what they call dust obscuration fins, where maybe the star just had a mass of boop and threw out a cloud a soot that temporarily hid it from view.

But those would look different.

They look very different. Doff clouds tend to dim the star in a particular way. They red in the light. They don't typically make the star disappear completely, and so so quickly this was different. This looked terminal.

So to recap the timeline, we have a star that gets a fever. It brightens up in twenty fourteen, then in twenty sixteen it pulls the plug. By twenty twenty three, there's almost nothing left of it except this faint, ghostly glow in the mid infrared, the warm dust signal.

Which tells us that something is still there. Yeah, but whatever it is, it's not a star anymore.

Okay, So we have the body, well the lack of a body, the crime scene. But to really understand why this is such a big deal, why this got published in a major journal like Science, we have to talk about how a star of twenty solar mass is supposed to die because going out quietly is not usually on the menu.

No, not at all. If you pick up any standard astrophysics textbook, you flip to the chapter on twenty solar mass stars, and that chapter ends with one word in big bold letters, supernova.

Let's break down that mechanism, because I think most people have the general idea of star runs out of fuel, goes boom, but the actual mechanics of why it goes boom, that's the part that failed.

Here, right, That's exactly where it feeled. So a star is this beautiful, delicate balancing act. We call it hydrostatic equilibrium. On one side, you have the relentless crushing force of gravity. It's pulling every single particle inward. It wants to crush the star into an infinitesimly small point. And on the other side, on the other side, you have the fusion engine in the core, the nuclear fire. It's generating a tremendous amount of outward pressure radiation pressure that holds up

A permanently inflated balloon, but the air inside is a continuous nuclear explosion.

Precisely for millions of years. Those two forces are in a perfect tug of war. They're balanced. Now, massive stars are like they're like onions. In the core, they burn hydrogen to helium. When that runs out, the core shrinks and heats up and starts burning helium into carbon, then carbon into neon, neon into oxygen, oxygen into silicon. You get these layers upon layers of heavier and heavier element until you get to iron, until you hit the iron catastrophe.

The outward pressure vanishes.

Instantly, the tug of war is over, and gravity wins, and it wins catastrophically. The core, which is about the size of the Earth but contains the mass of more than our Sun, collapses into something the size of a city action of a second. This is the core collapse.

And this is where the neutrinos come in, right, Because I've read that the neutrinos are actually the real drivers of the explosion, not the collapse itself.

They absolutely are. Yeah, they're the secret ingredient. When that core crushes down from a white dwarf density to a neutron star density, it releases an almost unimaginable flood of neutrinos.

These are the little ghost particles that pass through everything.

Normally, yes, a neutrino from the Sun can pass through light years of lead without interacting. But the density in this collapsing core is so beyond anything we can comprehend that even the neutrinos get trapped for just a moment, and in that moment they dump a massive amount of their energy into the layers of gas that are still falling inward.

So the core collapses, it kind of bounces, it releases this wave of neutrinos, and that neutrino energy is what creates the shockwave that blows the rest of the star to Smotherenes.

That is the successful supernova mechanism. That's the script. The shockwave rips through the star's outer layers, it energizes them. We see a brilliant flash of light that can outshine its entire galaxy and we get a beautiful expanding nebula left behind.

But thirty one twenty fourteen DS one, it didn't do that. The shockwave apparently didn't make it out of the locker room.

This is the heart of the failed supernova scenario. Yeah, imagine that shockwave is starting to move outward. It's got all this energy is trying to push its way out, but it's pushing against twenty sons worth of heavy gas that is falling inward at thousands of kilometers per second.

It's like trying to stop a freight train with a leaf blower.

That is a perfect analogy. The shockwave stalls. The ram pressure as we call it, of the infalling matter is just two immens. The shockwave creates a bit of a fizzle, maybe bubbles for a little bit, but ultimately it just gets overwhelmed. Gravity crushes it back down.

So the explosion is it's suffocated before it's even born.

Exactly. It's an engine that stalls on the launch pad, and all that material that was supposed to be ejected into space to form a nebula, it just keeps falling. It falls back onto the newly formed neutrons star in the center and that's too much mass, way too much mass. Yeah, the neutron star crosses its stability limit it's called the Tolmann Oppenheimer volkof limit if you want to get technical, and it can no longer support itself against its own gravity.

Wow, that is that's a grim way to go. It's a cosmic suffocation.

It really is. And for a very long time this was just a theory. It was something we saw in computer simulations. The math would sometimes say, hey, for a star of this particular mass and this rotation rate, the shockwave shouldn't make it out, But we had never definitively seen it happen.

We see the black holes that are leftover, and we see the supernovae, but capturing the moment of transition.

That's the holy grail of this field and.

One fourteen DS one is that holy grail. It's the missing link. It's the footage of the crime as it happened.

It connects the dots. It proves observationally that you do not need a spectacular visible explosion to create a dollar mass black hole.

But Hold on a second. This brings us to the twist in the plot. And this is the part of the Simons Foundation report that really gets into the new physics.

Right, the problem of the lingering light.

Yes, if the star just collapsed directly into a black hole, if the shockwave failed, why did we see anything at all? Why did it brighten back in twenty fourteen? And more importantly, why is there still an infrared glow there right now? If it's a black hole, shouldn't it just be dark?

It's a fantastic question. That's the one that stumped people for a while. If the collapse were perfectly spherical, if the star were just a perfectly still, non rotating ball of gas, it would have just blinked out, gone in milliseconds, end of story. But stars aren't motionless. They spin, They spin, and they churn. The report puts a huge emphasis on the roll of convection.

Okay, so let's unpack convection in this context. I know convection from you know, boiling a pot of water on the stove. Hot stuff rises, cool stuff sinks, it creates a current.

It's the exact same principle, just on a nuclear egalactic scale. The eider. Layers of a massive star like this a red supergin, are very loosely bound. They're boiling violently. You have these giant cells of hot plasma, some of them larger than our entire sun, that arise into the surface, cooling and then sinking back down.

That's incredible.

It's a chaotic, turbulent environment. But crucially, all of that churning motion preserves angular momentum.

This is high school physics coming back to haunt me. Angular momentum.

That's the ice skater analogy, right, That is the classic perfect analogy. An ice skater is spinning with her arms stretched out. She pulls her arms in close to her body, and what happens.

She spins way faster.

She spins much much faster. That's the conservation of angular momentum. You can't just create or destroy that spin. It has to go somewhere.

Okay.

Now apply that exact same principle to the collapsing star. You have all this churning gas way out in the star's envelope. As gravity starts to pull it inward toward the newly formed black hole, It's like a skater pulling our arms in. That gas starts to spin incredibly fast.

It speeds up as it falls.

It speeds up so much that it eventually hits what we call a centrifical barrier. It's just spinning too fast. The centrifical force pushing outwards starts to fight against the gravity pulling inward, so the gas can't fall straight into the black hole.

It gets backed up like a traffic jam.

It forms an accretion disc, it goes into orbit. And this is where the report uses an analogy that I think is just brilliant. It comes from one of the researchers, Andrea and Tony at the Flat Iron Institute.

The bathtub analogy.

The bathtub imagine a tub full of water. If the water's perfectly still and you pull the plug, what happens?

It just glugs straight down. It drains pretty quickly.

Right, that's a direct collapse without any rotation.

Yeah.

But if you get your hand in there and swirl the water first, give it some angular momentum, and then you.

Pull the plug, ah, it creates a vortex, a whirlpool. It circles the drain, and crucially.

It takes a whole lot longer to empty the tub, doesn't it If the water has to lose that spin, that angular momentum through friction before it can actually fall down the hole.

So the star thirty one twenty fourteen DS one is a cosmic bathtub slowly draining into a black hole.

That's it. The water is the stellar plasma, the drain is the black holes event horizon, and the swirling vortex is the hot, glowing accretion disk.

And the swirling explains the light, the glow that's left over.

It explains everything. First, friction, when you have gas scrolling around that fast, rubbing against other layers of gas, it generates an immense amount of heat. We are talking about friction on a scale that releases X rays and a ton of thermal energy.

So the drain itself is glowing.

The water circling the drain is glowing. But there's a second, really important part to this mechanism. The energy from that friction, from that hot disk, it doesn't just sit there, It pushes back. It actually provides enough energy to drive some of the outermost material away from the star.

Wait, so the very act of feeding the black hole actually makes the star kind of vomit some of its material back out.

That's a violent, but very accurate way of putting it, it ejects its outermost, most loosely bound envelope of gas. This gas expands out into space away from the black hole. And as any gas expands, what does it do?

It cools down.

It cools down, and as it cools it crosses a critical temperature threshold, a point where individual atoms of things like silicon and carbon can finally slow down enough to stick together. They form solid grains, They form dust, cosmic dust sut essentially.

Okay, let me see if I have the full picture here, because this is amazing. The core collapses, the big explosion fails, a black hole is born in the center. The outer layers of the star try to fall in, but they're spinning two fat so they form a hot, glowing disc around the black hole, like water down and drain.

Yep, you've got it.

That hot disk then flings some of the very outermost material away from the whole system, and that ejected material flies outward, cools down, and condenses into a giant shell of dust.

A perfect summary.

And that dust shell that's the curtain. That's what hides the star.

That's the curtain. Dust is incredibly effective at blocking visible and near infrared light. It absorbs it and scatters it. That is why the star vanished in twenty sixteen. The dust shell basically hid the scene of the crime. But and here's the absolute key to the infrared signal. Dust gets warmed up. It absorbed the intense heat coming from that inner engine, that hot accretion disk, and it reradiates that heat.

It glows in the dark.

It glows in the mid infrared. The dust shell is acting like a lamp shade. You can't see the blindingly bright light bulb the hot accretion disk directly anymore, but you can see the warm, gentle glow of the lamp cade surrounding it.

Wow. That is such a satisfyingly complete explanation. It ticks every single box in the data. The brightening in twenty fourteen was the star becoming unstable, the initial belch the vanishing was the dust curtain forming. And the faint low we see now is the warm lamp shade powered by the swirling drain underneath.

And it turns what was just a weird, confusing event into a clear physics lesson. It tells us that these massive stars don't just turn off even in failure. Their deaths are incredibly dynamic, chaotic, and well messy processes.

So this brings us to the timescale of it all, which the report calls the long goodbye you mentioned The bathtub analogy explains why it takes longer to drain. How much longer are we talking?

So if it were a simple freefall, a direct collapse with no rotation, the whole thing would be over in a matter of months, maybe a year at most, the star would be gone. Because of the angular momentum, the viscous time scale, as it's called, takes over. The material has to slowly lose its spin through friction, and that process it'll take decades.

Decades we're still watching it happen.

Oh yeah, we will be watching this star slowly drain for the rest of our scientific careers. Andrea and Tony, the researcher i mentioned, actually calculated the accretion rates. It's a very slow feed. The black hole is just sipping at the material, not gulping it.

And how much of the star actually makes it down the drain in the end, that's one of.

The most surprising parts of the simulation results. Their calculation suggests that only about one percent of the star's original outer envelope actually falls into the black hole during this initial bright phase.

Only one percent. That seems incredibly inefficient.

It turns out black holes can be very messy eaters. That angular momentum barrier is really really effective at keeping material out. The vast majority of the star's outer layers are either ejected into the interstellar medium forever or they'll hang out in a much larger, cooler disc for thousands of years. But that tiny one percent, that's more than enough to power the infrared glow that we're seeing today.

So M thirty one twenty fourteen DS one is essentially a ghost. It's a black hole wearing the dusty corpse of its parents star like a like a shroud or a disguise.

That is a very metal way to put it. But yes, fundamentally that is what we are looking at.

I try. But this leads to the bigger question. Right, you mentioned this is a Rosetta stone. It helps us translate the data from this one event. Does this help us find others? Or is this starts a complete freak accident, a cosmic oddball.

And that's probably the most important takeaway from a scientific perspective. This is almost certainly not unique. In fact, as soon as the team understood the pattern, they were looking at the signature of brighton then vanished, then lead behind an infrared glow. They did what any good detective would do.

They went back and looked at some old cold cases.

Exactly. They re examined a different star, another one with a bar code name, and GC six' nine four six bh.

One rolls right off the.

Tongue this one is in a different, galaxy The fireworks, galaxy which is about twenty two million light years. Away back in two thousand and, nine this star did something very very. Similar it suddenly brightened up to about a million times The sun's, luminosity and then it just vanished from.

Sight and what do they call it at the, Time.

At the, time astronomer was just called it a red. Transient they debated it. Endlessly no one could. Agree was it a failed? Supernova was it two stars more? Together was it some weird type of eruption we'd never seen. Before the data was ambiguous, now but now FOURTEEN ds one provides the. Template it provides the. Key they look back at the old data for that star and the light curve the timeline of. Events it matches almost. Perfectly it's the same. SIGNATURE ngc six x nine four SIX

Then so we're starting to build a family tree of these. Things we're defining a new.

Category we are defining a new class of stellar. Death and this has huge implications for, well for our census of black holes in the.

Universe how, so what does it?

Change, well think About ligo And, virgo the gravitational wave. Detectors for the past, decade they've been detecting the mergers of black, holes and a consistent puzzle has been that many of these black holes are surprisingly. Massive we're seeing them at, thirty, forty even fifty times the mass of The.

Sun and that's been a, problem right because if a star explodes as a regular, supernova it blows a lot of its own mass away in the. Explosion it shouldn't be able to leave behind such a heavy black.

Hole, exactly if you're a sixty solar mass star and you blow off half your mass in a spectacular, explosion you can't leave behind a fifty solar mass black. Hole the math just doesn't. Work but if you are a failed, supernova.

You don't blow anything. Off you keep all of the.

Masks you keep almost all of. It if the star just collapses and swallows its own, envelope the resulting black hole is much much. Heavier this, mechanism the silent, death might just be the missing production line for all of these unexpectedly massive black holes That lego has been.

Seeing that connects the dots on a cosmological. Scale the silence we're seeing here explains the gravity waves we're detecting from across the.

Universe it really. Does it suggests that failing to explode is actually a very successful way to build big black.

Holes you, know this brings us to the more existential part of this whole, conversation and, honestly this is the part that kind of keeps me up.

At, night the silent universe.

Idea, yeah we have built our entire understanding of the cosmos on the things we can, see the blight, lights the loud. Bangs we literally count the number of supernova we see to estimate how fast galaxies are forming. Stars we use a certain type of supernova as standard candles to measure the expansion of the universe.

Itself we are fundamentally biased toward the loud and the.

Bright but what, if what if we're missing half the?

Picture that is the big profound question The Cachelai day and his team are. Posing if a significant fraction of massive, stars maybe it's ten, percent maybe it's thirty, percent we don't know, yet if they die in, silence that our entire census of the universe is.

Wrong it's like trying to count the population of a city by only counting the people who are screaming at the top of their.

Lungs that is a perfect. Analogy we have been completely ignoring the quiet. Ones and this has other consequences. Too it changes the chemical evolution of a. Galaxy supernovae are the great. Dispersers they forge heavy elements in their, cores the oxygen you're, breathing the calcium in your, bones and then they spread that material throughout the galaxy to be.

Used in the next generation of stars and.

Planets but if these stars don't, explode they lock all those precious heavy elements away inside black holes event horizon.

Forever they hoard, them they take them out a, Circulation.

They completely remove them from the cosmic. Ecosystem so the rate of failed supernovae directly determines how much stuff is available in a galaxy to make planets and eventually to make. People so the story OF.

M thirty one twenty FOURTEEN ds one isn't just a weird astronomical. Curiosity it's variable in the equation of. Life it really, is and it makes you, wonder you, know about things like The fermi, paradox where is? Everybody maybe the universe is just darker and quieter than we thought it. Was maybe advanced civilizations get swallowed in the dark along with their home stars and we just never see the.

Flash oh that's a that's a dark. Turn but let me offer a more hopeful. Counterpoint. Technology the only reason we found this event is because we had the right kind of. Eyes we Had neo, wise which could see in the. Infrared we have The James Webb Space telescope, now which is even more. Powerful we are for the first time developing the sensory organs to perceive the dark parts of the.

Universe we're evolving our ability to.

See we're learning to see the, shadows AND i think that's incredibly. Hopeful we're finally realizing that the absence of light is also a form of, information a very powerful.

One the absence of light is. INFORMATION i love. That it's Very Sherlock. Holms you, know the curious incident of the dog in the. Nighttime what the dog did nothing in the? Nighttime that was the curious incident exactly.

Thirty one twenty. FOURTEEN ds one is the star that didn't. Bark and because we finally noticed the, silence we learned something fundamental about how a black hole is.

Born so as we kind of wrap this all, UP i want to go back to that image of the, bathtub the swirling, water the. Drain it's such a, mundane everyday image for something so catastrophic and so, Cosmic.

But that's the beauty of. It physics is. Universal the same principles of fluid dynamics and angular momentum that drain your tub after a bath also govern the death of a sun two and a half million light years.

Away that is either strangely comforting or deeply. TERRIFYING i haven't quite decided which.

Yet, WELL i. Both booth is.

Good so the big takeaways for everyone listening, today what should they remember from all?

THIS i think first massive stars don't always. Explode sometimes they just they give up the ghost and. Collapse, second this collapse is an. Instant it's a messy. Process convection and the star zone spin create this, swirling dusty death spiral that takes decades to. Unfold so it's a long. Goodbye it's a very long. Goodbye, third we can actually see this, happen but only if we look in the right kind of light in the. Infrared the dust hides

THEM a universe full of. Ghosts i'm definitely going to be thinking about that the next TIME i look up At oryan's.

Shoulder just to keep a close eye on beetlegars for.

ME i, will and if it blinks, out you are the first Person i'm.

Calling i'll be waiting for the.

Call thank you so much for walking us through, this and thank you all for listening to this investigation into the. Dark it's just a reminder that sometimes the biggest discoveries happen not with a, bang but in the, silence so keep looking up and don't be afraid of the.

Dark goodbye, everyone set pass school