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"...Scientists sifting through archival data captured by NASA's former NEOWISE mission found an unusual star that quickly disappeared, fading to nothing more than a wispy shell. Their conclusion: The star, a dying supergiant named M31-2014-DS1 located in the Andromeda Galaxy, imploded into a black hole instead of undergoing the more common scenario in which a star dramatically explodes in a supernova before forming a neutron star or a black hole. While astronomers had previously predicted that some massive stars might quietly implode in this manner, observational evidence has been limited.

"This star used to be one of the most luminous stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and now it was nowhere to be seen," says Caltech alumnus Kishalay De (PhD '21), a professor at Columbia University and an associate research scientist at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute. "Imagine if the star Betelgeuse suddenly disappeared. Everybody would lose their minds! The same kind of thing [was] happening with this star in the Andromeda Galaxy."

The findings were reported today in the journal Science..."

High School Student Discovers 1.5 Million Potential New Astronomical Objects by Developing an A.I. Algorithm

The 18-year-old won $250,000 for training a machine learning model to analyze understudied data from NASA's retired NEOWISE telescope

Smithsonian Magazine · smithsonianmag.com