![A dust-bound supermassive black hole [artist's impression]](http://gumlet.assettype.com/downtoearth%2F2026-02-13%2Fjf15ewss%2Fheic0409a.jpg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
Subscribe
Massive star in Andromeda collapsed directly into a black hole
No supernova explosion preceded the disappearance
Event identified in archival NASA NEOWISE infrared data
Findings published in Science provide rare evidence of direct collapse
Scientists have captured what they describe as the clearest view yet of a star collapsing directly into a black hole without first exploding as a supernova.
The star, located in the Andromeda galaxy around 2.5 million light years from Earth, gradually brightened in infrared light over three years before fading dramatically and disappearing, leaving behind a shell of dust. Although a National Aeronautics and Space Administration telescope recorded the phenomenon in 2014, it took years for researchers to identify what had occurred.
A team led by Kishalay De, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, now says the observations show a star undergoing “direct collapse”, turning into a black hole without first exploding. The findings were published in the journal Science on February 12, 2026.
“This has probably been the most surprising discovery of my life,” De said in a statement. “The evidence of the disappearance of the star was lying in public archival data and nobody noticed for years until we picked it out.”
The star, known as M31-2014-DS1, was a massive, hydrogen-depleted supergiant. When newly formed, it was around 13 times the mass of the Sun. By the time of its death, it had shed much of its mass through powerful winds and was close to five times the mass of the Sun.
“The dramatic and sustained fading of this star is very unusual, and suggests a supernova failed to occur, leading to the collapse of the star’s core directly into a black hole,” De said.
“Stars with this mass have long been assumed to always explode as supernovae,” he added. “The fact that it didn’t suggests that stars with the same mass may or may not successfully explode, possibly due to how gravity, gas pressure, and powerful shock waves interact in chaotic ways with each other inside the dying star.”
Black holes were first theorised more than 50 years ago, and dozens are now known in the Milky Way, with hundreds more detected through gravitational wave observations. However, scientists still lack a clear consensus on which stars form black holes and how that process unfolds.
The team identified the event by analysing archival data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission. Drawing on a prediction from the 1970s that direct collapse would leave behind a faint infrared glow, they conducted what the press release describes as the largest study of variable infrared sources ever undertaken. After tracking every star in the Milky Way and other local galaxies, they found that M31-2014-DS1 matched their predictions.
“Unlike finding supernovae which is easy because the supernova outshines its entire galaxy for a few weeks, finding individual stars that disappear without producing an explosion is remarkably difficult,” De said.
It comes as a shock to know that a massive star basically disappeared (and died) without an explosion and nobody noticed it for more than five years, he added. “It really impacts our understanding of the inventory of massive stellar deaths in the universe. It says that these things may be quietly happening out there and easily going unnoticed.”