Kishaloy Day

Recently, some researchers were going through archival data from a NASA spacecraft to track any changes in the brightness of millions of stars over a 15-year period.

And this one massive star really stood out as unusual.

Kishaloy Day is an astronomer with Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute.

In the journal Science, he and his colleagues say the best explanation for this star winking out is that it ran out of fuel and imploded, transforming into a black hole, something that's been seen as theoretically possible, but hard to detect.

Nell Greenfield, Boyce, NPR News.

What we found was that somewhere around 2015, 2016 or so, it actually brightened in infrared light for about a year before it essentially plummeted and disappeared.