Astronomers may have witnessed the birth of a brand-new black hole in our neighboring galaxy, offering one of the clearest glimpses yet of how some stars quietly collapse into these cosmic abysses without the usual fireworks of an explosion.

While scouring archival data from NASA's NEOWISE mission, a team led by Columbia University astronomer Kishalay De discovered that one of the brightest stars in the Andromeda Galaxy mysteriously brightened over a decade ago, faded dramatically and then vanished from view. The star, labeled M31-2014-DS1, lay about 2.5 million light-years from Earth and weighed just 13 times the mass of our sun — relatively lightweight by typical black hole-forming standards, according to De and colleagues' research.

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