Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2020

42 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020 SPACE CHRONICLES be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner.” Between 2001 and 2011, various teams of astronomers stud- ied the mysterious massive star, lo- cated in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy, and their observations indicated it was in a late stage of its evolution. Allan and his collaborators in Ire- land, Chile and the US wanted to find out more about how very mas- sive stars end their lives, and the ob- ject in the Kinman Dwarf seemed like the perfect target. But when they pointed ESO’s VLT to the dis- tant galaxy in 2019, they could no longer find the telltale signatures of the star. “Instead, we were surprised to find out that the star had disap- peared!” says Allan, who led a study of the star published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Located some 75 million light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, the Kinman Dwarf galaxy is too far away for as- tronomers to see its individual stars, but they can detect the signatures of VLT captures the disappearance of a massive star U sing the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Tel- escope (VLT), astronomers have discovered the absence of an unstable massive star in a dwarf galaxy. Scientists think this could in- dicate that the star became less bright and partially obscured by dust. An alternative explanation is that the star collapsed into a black hole without producing a super- nova. “If true,” says team leader and PhD student Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, “this would by ESO