An article published in the “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports the mysterious disappearance of a massive star of the luminous blue variable type in the Kinman dwarf galaxy. A team of researchers led by Andrew Allan of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, detected the disappearance of that star using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Additional observations and research of archival data to try to better understand the events led to believe that the most likely possibilities are a transformation that led to a sharp drop in brightness, maybe dimmed even more due to the dust that covered it, and its direct collapse into a black hole without a supernova explosion.

An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports a study on stars of a particular type since they’re much smaller than the Sun but much hotter and therefore blue. A team of researchers led by Yazan Al Momany of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, Padua, used various instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and NTT (New Technology Telescope) in Chile to study stars of that type discovering the equivalent of sunspots but even three thousand times larger in size. In some of these spots, flares have been observed that are millions of times more intense than the Sun’s which indicate the presence of very intense magnetic fields.