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Qabil Ashirov

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Astronomers have observed the dramatic demise of a massive star that chose the wrong cosmic partner—a black hole. The explosive event, triggered as the star attempted to resist the black hole’s gravitational pull, has been classified as a new type of supernova.

According to Reuters, cited by Azernews, the star—at least ten times more massive than the Sun—was gravitationally bound to a black hole of similar mass in a binary system. Over time, the distance between the two objects narrowed, and the black hole’s immense gravity began distorting the star, pulling it out of its spherical shape.

Astrophysicist Alexander Gagliano from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions at MIT described the phenomenon in a study published this week in the Astrophysical Journal:

“We found a massive star locked in a deadly tango with a black hole. Over years, the star shed its mass in a death spiral and ultimately exploded, releasing more energy in a single second than the Sun will produce over its entire lifetime.”

The explosion occurred approximately 700 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year—about 9.5 trillion kilometers.

Stars with at least eight times the mass of the Sun typically end their lives in supernovae. Those with twenty times the Sun’s mass often collapse into black holes after the explosion.