For the first time ever, pictures of a massive star (50-100 times more massive than our own Sun) exploding and becoming a black hole (Science Daily).
Supernova SN 2005gl: explosion from start to finish, including the black hole ending
This is so impressive (and so cool) – you can see the star’s Solar Filaments and Prominences, just as in our own Sun. The star exploding, and most of the material going inward as the star collapses…
Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Physics and Prof. Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University, saw the star before going supernovae, calculated its mass… then were lucky enough to capture the photos (using the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope) of the star going supernovae and becoming a black hole.
…only a small part of the star’s mass was flung off in the explosion. Most of the material, says Gal-Yam, was drawn into the collapsing core as its gravitational pull mounted. Indeed, in subsequent telescope images of that section of the sky, the star seems to have disappeared. In other words, the star has now become a black hole – so dense that light can’t escape.
Note that when an exploding star is 20 times the mass of our sun or more, its gravitational pull becomes so great that it wins over the energy of outburst itself (inward energy beats outward energy), resulting in a black hole, with gravity forces so powerful that not even light waves can’t escape – becoming “invisible”.
ceo