WASHINGTON \u2013 <\/p>\n
A supernova \u2014 the explosive death of a star \u2014 is always violent, blasting material into space while typically leaving behind a compact stellar remnant like a neutron star or black hole. But some supernovas involving the largest stars in the cosmos may be so immensely powerful they leave absolutely nothing behind.<\/p>\n
Scientists since the 1960s have theorized the existence of these ultra-powerful supernovas, and have now come up with evidence for them \u2014 albeit indirect \u2014 in research involving black \u200bholes and ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.<\/p>\n
Such supernovas are predicted to occur in the most enormous stars \u2014 those with a \u200cmass around \u200c140 to 260 times greater than the sun, according to Hui Tong, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Monash \u200bUniversity in Australia and lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2013 A supernova \u2014 the explosive death of a star \u2014 is always violent, blasting material into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[305,64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-584379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}