When you look up at the night sky, you see thousands upon thousands of stars with the naked eye. However, you must be aware that there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone.

What's more, scientists are always hard at work trying to track and observe as many of these as possible. They do this for a number of reasons. It might be to study how a star is born, how it evolves, how it affects stuff around it, and how it dies.

Sometimes, if they are lucky, scientists also get to observe some really weird phenomenon that requires some of the smartest brains in the world to come together to make sense of.

Something similar happened in 2019 when a giant star seemingly vanished. And even though we have ideas about what might have happened, we still don't know 100% what exactly happened.

Vanished Star

For over a decade, scientists had been observing a star in the nearby Kinman dwarf galaxy. This star was 2.5 times brighter than the sun, so it was clearly visible to the scientists using powerful telescopes.

In 2019, however, it winked out of existence. Now, an astronomical object that huge simply doesn't disappear. So, scientists quickly started to find explanations.

Fortunately, astronomers at the Trinity College Dublin had some really convincing explanations. They suggested two possibilities for what might have happened to the star.

First, it could have reduced its brightness drastically (which stars tend to do) along with being obscured by huge clouds of dust (the same way clouds on Earth could block the sun suddenly).

Second, the star could have died and turned into a black hole without exploding in a supernova first. Usually, when large stars die, they explode into a supernova and then turn into black holes. However, it might not be impossible for a star to just turn into a black hole as we already know of one other star that did the same.