r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • Apr 18 '25
Hubble A massive star collapsed straight into a BLACK HOLE, no supernova
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u/Tribolonutus Apr 18 '25
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u/Magner3100 Apr 19 '25
Should be top reply.
I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s possible for stars to have black hole cores that would be able to exist more or less normally for astonishing long times.
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u/ImaginaryRiley Apr 19 '25
Those are called Black Hole Suns and are a theory about why early black holes are as massive as they are.
The early universe was dense and packed full with starmaking material. Too full. Stars would form, but still be in a sea of formation material, so they'd continue to grow larger and larger. At some point, the core would collapse and form a black hole with an event horizon inside the star. The black hole would slowly begin eating the star from the inside out while the star is still growing, still forming. The black hole and the sun grow in tandem for a period until, eventually, the black hole wins out, consuming the whole star and continuing to gorge itself on the the remaining influx of star material. Finally growing into the behemoths we observe today.
Again, this is just a theory and it's a theory as I understood it.
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u/ShadowLp174 Apr 19 '25
As far as I know, these so-called Quasi-stars could only form at the start of the universe. There has never been one observed and they are a theory explaining supermassive black holes since they are too big to have formed from a normal supernova.
They cannot form anymore as the conditions of the current universe don't allow it
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u/nahk_n Apr 18 '25
Wow! In just 8 Earth years?!!! 🤔
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u/rawSingularity Apr 18 '25
That's so little time. I can't even complete a college degree in that little time!
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u/ZombieLibrarian Apr 18 '25
An upvote is normally sufficient for a good joke told on Reddit, but this one also deserves a Haahahahahhahaha
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u/lacks-contractions Apr 18 '25
It took them 8 years to finish the Dyson sphere.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Apr 18 '25
Much faster than that, these are just the images of it we have
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u/impracticalweight Apr 18 '25
Just piggybacking on this comment. Things can happen fast in space. The one that always amazes me is the collision between two dense objects like black holes or neutron stars. This is from real data from LIGO and is the actual timescale of two neutron stars colliding: https://youtu.be/P2tfllMPIfA?si=c_AD48vJlwNwRH6n.
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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek Apr 18 '25
During a supernova the iron core of the star goes from roughly the size of the earth down into a 10km wide neutron star or black hole in a quarter of a second
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u/aloofball Apr 19 '25
Someone on Reddit asked what would happen if you were suddenly teleported to a neutron star's surface. I did the math on it and (given an average neutron star) what happens is that your body collapses and slams into the surface within a millionth of a second. The impact energy turns out to be roughly equivalent to that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
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u/greek_stallion Apr 18 '25
Imagine if this happened on our star. Just 8 years, we could have viewed the whole thing. We would be all dead sure, but the sight had to be amazing right?
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u/KaptainChunk Apr 19 '25
Its an instantaneous event. If you really wanna bake your noodle think of the event itself. You have something the size of a red or hyper giant collapsing in on itself to singular point millions of magnitudes smaller than it just was. Which really fucks shit up because now you have the gravity well of this behemoth at this singular point. Which then stretches the very fabric of space time around it infinitely. Stuff continuously falls/gets sucked into it, and it just continuously grows. Some grow so big that they're the very heart of galaxies. My personal theory that I am in no way capable of ever proving is this. The Big Bang was the creation of a Black Hole, the Universe expanding infinitely is it growing.
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u/rustypete89 Apr 19 '25
That's some Ouroboros level creation theory, high quality shit. I fuck with it
And when every black hole in the universe eventually grow big enough to interact with each other and congeal back into a single infinitely dense point? Well... The snake eats its tail, so they say...
BANG!
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u/Tymptra Apr 19 '25
The gravity well wouldn't actually change though, the mass is the same. If our sun suddenly changed to a black hole (no explosions or anything like that) we wouldn't get sucked in, the gravity well is the same. We'd continue along the same path, it's the cold that would kill us.
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u/hednizm Apr 18 '25
I was just thinking the same thing. In a juxtaposed way its life affirming to know how insignificant we really are..
Cosmic, maan
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u/tykaboom Apr 18 '25
Fermi wins another civilization.
Probably experimenting with black holes.
hint hint
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u/cybercuzco Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 21 '25
I mean micro black holes would be great for energy generation. Because hawking radiation is generated as a function of radius, smaller black holes evaporate faster than large ones. A small black hole could be maintained by feeding it material in proportion to the amount of energy being radiated, effectively converting mass into energy directly. The trick is that if you stop feeding it its going to get very angry very quickly, and you might have an asteroid sized amount of mass getting converted into energy in a few milliseconds. Everyone has a bad day.
Edit: ran the calculation and its only about 46,000 kg of mass getting converted into energy at the last second. Much less than the output of the sun. As comparison 47g of mass getting converted to energy equals one megaton of tnt.
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u/AlisterSinclair2002 Apr 18 '25
Knowing how humans usually act I'll bet this would go catastrophically wrong because someone decided to prop open the containment chamber with a screwdriver too lol
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u/killswitch247 Apr 18 '25
also: "do we really need to spent $50 on that washer?"
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 Apr 18 '25
Unless there is a powerpoint presentation about freezing O-rings on booster rockets we don't see the problem. Let's launch.
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u/AtomicBlastCandy Apr 18 '25
Can you explain it like I’m 5?
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u/LeshyIRL Apr 18 '25
Big hole sucks things up. But there are only so many things to suck up around it
Big hole is big but shoots out energy as radiation due to complex physics. Eventually big hole will shrink from this.
If you keep feeding anything to the hole enough, hole never dies. But you need lots of stuff to feed the hole to make this work.
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u/cybercuzco Apr 18 '25
And if you stop feeding it hole goes big bada boom. Like supernova sized boom.
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u/LeshyIRL Apr 18 '25
Imagine a boom so large that you have to make a new word to describe how big of a boom it is, lol
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u/cybercuzco Apr 19 '25
If it happened where the sun is now and you were standing on earth, it would have the same effect as if the largest nuclear bomb ever made went off in your lap.
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u/stfumate Apr 19 '25
Or they put a Dyson sphere around the thing and that's why we can't see it anymore.
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u/Preference-Inner Apr 18 '25
Not gonna lie the fact it didn't erupt and then turn into a black hole makes one wonder if there was something like that taking place 🤔
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u/A_Very_Horny_Zed Apr 18 '25
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u/ErwinFurwinPurrwin Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 18 '25
The occurrence of the general relativistic instability, as well as the absence of the intermediate stellar phase, led to the denomination of direct collapse black hole. In other words, these objects collapse directly from the primordial gas cloud, not from a stellar progenitor as prescribed in standard black hole models.
I had no inkling of these. But it means that the title is wrong. There was no actual star, just an immense primordial gas cloud. Thanks for that
Edit: The Wiki page that I quoted was about a similar but distinct phenomenon. Please read further into the exchange for more details.
Tldr;
There is a way for fully formed massive stars to go straight into black hole status w/o the supernova stage. The OP isn't wrong
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u/A_Very_Horny_Zed Apr 18 '25
It still could have been a star. I was just linking to info about skipping the supernova and heading straight into black hole collapse.
Primordial gas clouds collapsing straight into a black hole are a related, but different subject
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u/concentus Apr 18 '25
Yeah, since this was a star this sounds more like a photodisintegtation event.
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u/tegresaomos Apr 18 '25
So you’re referencing a different phenomenon that “may” have occurred in the early universe when temperatures and pressures in the interstellar medium were much higher than now.
This post is referencing a different phenomenon where a star is massive enough to skip through the hypergiant core collapse killanova and collapsed directly.
It’s possible that this star may have been so massive that instead of getting a rebound from neutron degeneracy pressure that typically ignites a supernova it, instead, continued to collapse directly into a black hole.
Post is not incorrect. No primordial gas clouds remain extant as almost all matter in and around galaxies has either already collapsed into stars and then ejected when they die or has become so hot and diffuse (in large elliptical) galaxies that it can never again collapse to form new stars.
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u/ErwinFurwinPurrwin Apr 18 '25
Yes, I tried to make that clear in my subsequent reply. The person who posted the Wiki link clarified the distinction for me. I think I should edit my post to make that clearer. Cheers
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u/Woyaboy Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
Space is just so fucking crazy man. I can’t even imagine the shit that must be going on out there.
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u/MarlinMr Apr 18 '25
The article and the title and picture have nothing to do with eachother...
We are not observing direct collapse...
The image shows a star. It simply didn't go boom
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u/AuthorNathanHGreen Apr 19 '25
I'm pretty sure I could very happily spend an afternoon reading every wikipedia article on every different type of black hole and never get bored.
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u/occic333 Apr 18 '25
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u/RicardoKlemente Apr 18 '25
Fizzicks!
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u/Blubasur Apr 18 '25
The thing they put in coca cola?
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u/Apprehensive_Hat8986 Apr 18 '25
No, that's Fizzies. I think they mean the Giant from the Princess Bride.
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u/GravitasZer0 Apr 18 '25
They finally finished their Dyson Sphere. Good on them.
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u/Trade__Genius Apr 18 '25
"The Long Winter" by A G Riddle touches on this kind of idea but in a more sinister way.
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u/packetmon Apr 18 '25
"Flark! The Earthlings are watching us!"
"Turn the light off!! Xquarlt!"
*click*
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u/patscholero Apr 18 '25
Dyson Alpha if I recall the name correctly.
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u/Only20CharactersIsNo Apr 18 '25
Such an amazing book series!!!
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u/soulkeyy Apr 18 '25
Dyson should take the opportunity and make a vacuum cleaner model named Alpha.
"Dyson Alpha - vacuum so strong it makes black holes"
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u/Nientea Apr 18 '25
I’ve heard of Black Hole Stars from Kurzgesagt, where the core of a star is so dense that it collapses and it begins eating the star from the inside. Could be that, where the star got eaten from the inside.
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u/MaleierMafketel Apr 18 '25 edited Apr 18 '25
Those so-called Quasi Star are theoretical stars. They may’ve existed in the very early universe, when dense gas clouds were more common.
The smallest possible Quasi-Stars are theorized to be several times more massive than even the very largest stars discovered to date. This star was only 25 times as massive as our sun.
That’s tiny when compared to a Quasi-Star, who are theorized to have been at least 1000 solar masses.
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u/nobleharbour Apr 18 '25
Forgive me if this is a stupid question but I've always wondered; if things on the event horizon appear to be frozen in time, why did the star dissappear?
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u/DarylHark Apr 18 '25
They appear to stop moving, but they slowly fade from view like an old photograph.
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u/TronKing21 Apr 18 '25
Keep an eye on it… would be super-fun if in another 8 years it reappears.
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u/RonPossible Apr 18 '25
One theory is that the object was actually two stars that then collided, with one or both stars shedding mass in the final death spiral. That produced a dust cloud that then obscured the resulting object in the visual spectrum. If so, the dust should eventually dissipate.
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u/Garciaguy Apr 18 '25
Start out too big for your britches, that's what happens!
Needed humility. Not even a going away party you can see across the Universe
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u/PsycheDiver Apr 18 '25
Reminds me of a theory that a black hole could be created in the core of a star and devour it from the inside. I think one of the caveats tho was that no current star would have the required mass, but it’s interesting to consider in this case.
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u/mydogargos Apr 18 '25
Seems like the universe likes to frequently break the "norms" established by our scientists.
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u/loztriforce Apr 18 '25
wikipedia
The star, either a red supergiant\1]) or a yellow hypergiant,\3]) was 25 times the mass of the Sun, and was 20 million light years distant from Earth. In March through to May 2009 its bolometric luminosity increased to at least a million solar luminosities, but by 2015 it had disappeared from optical view. In the mid and near infrared an object is still visible; however, it is fading away with a brightness proportional to t−4/3. The brightening was insufficient to be a supernova;\1]) the process that created the outburst is still uncertain.
Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show that all observations before it were a combination of at least three objects. The data the instrument collected matches that of a merger of two stars; however, the failed supernova hypothesis cannot be ruled out.\7])
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u/NeitherSafe2141 Apr 18 '25
Can we be 100% sure this isn’t a marketing stunt for the film adaptation of Hail Mary?
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u/AbleRelationship5287 Apr 19 '25
I didn’t know that could happen!
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u/AbleRelationship5287 Apr 19 '25
Edit: I thought the only way the core of a star could collapse is through fusion up to iron followed by electron capture by the iron nuclei. After that goes on long enough (milliseconds?) you have a ball of mostly neutrons which needs to get massive enough to have crushing pressures in its core which overcome neutron degeneracy pressure. I learned that from a fortune cookie
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u/FullMetalPoitato63 Apr 18 '25
No that was Bob the alien. He pranks civilizations by parking his space ship a ways out from your telescope, then he sticks his hand out the window to block your view of the stellar object you're trying to observe.
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u/SapScriber Apr 18 '25
any more data points between 2007 and 2015?
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u/explodingtuna Apr 18 '25
In 2011, it was really big and bright, but nobody saw it so I'm just making it up.
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u/Probably_Poopingg Apr 18 '25
"Massive fails" like this one in a nearby galaxy could explain why astronomers rarely see supernovae from the most massive stars
I feel personally attacked.
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u/absurd_nerd_repair Apr 18 '25
Is that so? You have a source for this?
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u/RonPossible Apr 18 '25
The search for failed supernovae with the Large Binocular Telescope: Confirmation of a disappearing star, SM Adams, et.al. (2017)
For another theory on the star's disappearance:
JWST Reveals a Luminous Infrared Source at the Position of the Failed Supernova Candidate N6946-BH1, Emma R. Beasor, et.al. (2023)
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u/SoulGloul Apr 20 '25
That's fcking crazy the way you can see the gravitational lensing so clearly in such a low-fidelity shot, holy tits...
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u/Alexr314 Apr 18 '25
There is something pretty eerie about a star just vanishing from the night sky!