A supernova — the explosive death of a star — is always violent, hurling material into space and usually leaving behind a compact stellar remnant, like a neutron star or black hole. But some supernovae involving the biggest stars in the cosmos can be so immensely powerful that they leave absolutely nothing behind..
Since the 1960s, Scientists have theorized about the existence of these ultra-powerful supernovae and have now obtained evidence of them – albeit indirect – in research involving black holes and ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
These supernovae are predicted to occur in the most massive stars – those with a mass between 140 and 260 times that of the Sun, according to Hui Tong, a doctoral candidate in astrophysics at Monash University, in Australia, and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
“Despite their enormous mass, they have relatively short lives of about a few million years. For comparison, the Sun will live for about 10 billion years, so these stars burn out approximately a thousand times faster – like a huge firework that burns brightly and briefly before exploding,” said Tong.
The explosion of large stars with a certain mass leaves behind a neutron star, a compact, collapsed stellar core. Some even larger stars, when they explode, leave behind an exceptionally dense object with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. The black hole retains some of the star’s original mass, while the rest is ejected into space.
In this study, researchers analyzed data from 153 pairs of black holes, knowing their mass based on the gravitational waves they emitted, and then separated out the black holes that formed through the previous merger of two smaller black holes.
What the researchers next detected was the absence of black holes with masses between about 44 and 116 times the mass of the Sun, which they called the “forbidden band.”
This absence, they said, might be better explained if larger stars, which would be expected to leave behind black holes in this mass range, were instead obliterated at the end of their lifetime in a rare type of explosion called a pair instability supernova, leaving no trace.
“A pair instability supernova is one of the most violently explosive types of stellar death,” said astrophysicist and study co-author Maya Fishbach of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.
“In most cases, massive stars create black holes. The more massive the star, the heavier the black hole,” Fishbach said, until stars reach a certain mass threshold, beyond which the physics of their explosive death dictate that no stellar remnants remain.
See the main astronomical discoveries of 2026
These giant stars evolve in a similar way to other massive stars in the beginning, burning hydrogen and helium and building a large core composed mainly of carbon and oxygen. For the core to remain stable, a balance is necessary between internal gravitational pressure and the release of external energy — in the case of these stars, high-energy photons, the particles that make up light.
But at the extreme temperatures present inside these stars, some of the photons convert into pairs of subatomic particles called electrons and positrons, thus weakening the external pressure that helped maintain the core’s stability. These pairs of particles and the instability they cause explain the name of this class of supernovae.
“The core becomes unstable, leading to an uncontrolled collapse and then a violent thermonuclear explosion that tears the star apart,” Tong said.
Although such supernovae were first predicted six decades ago, Fishbach said, “they are rare and difficult to find and identify.”
Scientists have observed a type of stellar explosion called a superluminous supernova, which is a candidate for being a pair instability supernova. These explosions can be more than 10 billion times brighter than the Sun. But for now, the evidence presented in this study may be the best indication yet of the existence of pair instability supernovae.
“We are essentially using something invisible, black holes, as a record of some of the brightest explosions in the universe,” Tong said.
