Born phoenix-like from the ashes of a dying star? Science Photo Library/Getty

We’ve received a birth announcement from 20 million light years away, in the form of our first ever glimpse of what seems to be the birth of a black hole.

When massive stars run out of fuel, they die in a huge explosion, shooting out high-speed jets of matter and radiation. What’s left behind collapses into a black hole, which is so dense and has such strong gravity that not even light can escape it.

Or so the theory goes, anyway. Now, a team led by Christopher Kochanek at Ohio State University in Columbus have glimpsed something very special in data from the Hubble Space Telescope, from when it was watching the red supergiant star N6946-BH1, which is about 20 million light years from Earth.


Fading star

This star, first observed in 2004, was once about 25 times the mass of our sun. Kochanek and his colleagues found that for some months in 2009, the star briefly flared a million times brighter than our sun, then steadily faded away. New Hubble images show that it has disappeared in visible wavelengths, but a fainter source in the same spot is detectable in the infrared, as a warm afterglow.

These observations mesh with what theory predicts should happen when a star that size crumples into a black hole. First, the star spews out so many neutrinos that it loses mass. With less mass, the star lacks enough gravity to hold on to a cloud of hydrogen ions loosely bound around it. As this cloud of ions floats away, it cools off, allowing the detached electrons to reattach to the hydrogen. This causes a year-long bright flare – when it fades, only the black hole remains.

There are two other potential explanations for the star’s disappearing act: it could have merged with another star, or be hidden by dust. But they don’t fit the data: a merger would shine more brightly than the original star for much longer than a few months, and dust wouldn’t hide it for so long.

“It’s an exciting result and long anticipated,” says Stan Woosley at Lick Observatory in California.

“This may be the first direct clue to how the collapse of a star can lead to the formation of a black hole,” says Avi Loeb at Harvard University.

A dark life cycle

The find needs further confirmation, but that may not be far off. Material falling into the black hole would emit X-rays in a particular spectrum, which could be spotted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Kochanek says his group will be getting new data from Chandra in the next two months or so.

If Chandra sees nothing, that doesn’t mean it’s not a black hole. In any case, the team will continue to look with Hubble – the longer the star is not there, the more likely that it’s a black hole. “Patience proves it no matter what,” says Kochanek.

This data will help describe the beginning of the life cycle of a black hole, and will inform simulations of how black holes form and what makes a massive star form a neutron star rather than a black hole.

Despite calling himself a “nasty pessimist”, Kochanek thinks it’s quite likely this is indeed the formation of a black hole. “I’m not quite at ‘I’d bet my life on it’ yet,” he says, “but I’m willing to go for your life.”

Journal reference: arXiv, arxiv.org/abs/1609.01283