Massive Mega-Star Challenges Black Hole Theories by Clara Moskowitz

Astronomers have recently discovered a massive star that most likely dwarfed our sun and is now challenging theories of how stars form, die and form black holes.The star is a specific object called a magnetar. "Magnetars are extremely dense super-magnetic stars that can form from supernova explosions." The newly discovered magnetar has been calculated to likely weigh at least 40 times as much as the sun. Large stars in this mass category were thought to become black holes, not magnetars, when they exploded in supernovas."This therefore raises the thorny question of just how massive a star has to be to collapse to form a black hole if stars over 40 times as heavy as our sun cannot manage this feat," said researcher Norbert Langer of the Universität Bonn in Germany and the Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands."' When massive stars come to the end of their lives and die in supernovas, they leave behind remains. If the star is very massive, those remains are a black hole (a black hole is "an extremely dense collection of mass with such a strong gravitational pull, not even light can escape"). If the original star was slightly less massive, the supernova remains will become a neutron star (these objects are made mostly of neutrons, and are more dense than regular stars and less dense than black holes). Magnetars are a specific type of neutron star with colossal magnetic fields and are about a "million billion" times than that of Earth. Massive stars must get rid of more than nine-tenths of their mass before they explode as a supernova, because otherwise, they would create a black hole instead.

It is good that we discovered this huge magnetar. This is because now we know what might have been the reason that our sun was dwarfed and also because we now know how black holes form. We also now know that magnetars can be huge and that they can form from the remains of other stars that have exploded in supernovas just like black holes.

http://www.livescience.com/space/massive-mega-star-challenges-black-hole-theory-100818.html