A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the universe's rarest explosions
- Astronomers report a candidate for a very rare explosion in which an extremely massive star self-destructed rather than collapsed into a black hole. - Observations show unusually bright, long-lasting emission and spectral features consistent with a pair-instability or pulsational pair-instability supernova. - The event challenges models of the final stages of the most massive stars and may help refine mass-loss and nucleosynthesis predictions. - Multiple telescopes provided follow-up data, but researchers caution further study is needed to confirm the explosion mechanism.
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