Do stars disappear into their own black holes? A bizarre binary system says ‘yes’
Scientists have found strong evidence that some massive stars end their existence with a whimper, not a bang, and sink into one black hole of their own making without the light and fury of one supernova.
To understand why this is important, we need to start with a crash course in stellar evolution. Stars generate energy nuclear fusion processes in their nuclei that turn hydrogen into helium. When stars with at least eight times the mass of our sun When the hydrogen supply runs out, they start fusion reactions involving other elements - helium, carbon, oxygen, and so on, until ...