I'm John Batchew with David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show, and we're visiting with a professor

Kishelay Day of Columbia University, who is lead researcher in discovering something we didn't know

existed, which is a collapse of a smaller star into a black hole without a supernova. However, there is more work to be done. The discovery of this

particular star M31 in Andromeda required a great deal of scrupulous astronomy. So, Professor,

we give you an unlimited budget. What are you going to do? No, that's like dreamland for me.

Right.

So what this discovery shows us is that we can find evidence of these stars failing to

explore in probably some of these places where astronomers would not normally expect.

Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy.

Whenever you find something that is very nearby,

it usually tells us that that's not very uncommon, right?

If it was very uncommon, you wouldn't expect it to find it in such a nearby galaxy.

So these are clearly happening out there.

In the next decade, we will have increasing capabilities to find more of these, and that is spearheaded by a slew of survey telescopes that are becoming online, both from the largest ground-based telescopes and from large space-based telescopes.

So in the next few years, what we would like to do essentially is to carry out the largest

surveys of nearby galaxies, essentially staring at individual stars in nearby galaxies

and possibly thousands of nearby galaxies, trying to look for individual stars disappear into

darkness. This has not been possible in the past because technology hasn't allowed us to do so.

But our discovery shows that these are clearly out there.

And over the next few years, we hope to be able to find not one, but tens, maybe dozens of these things

by monitoring thousands of galaxies that we can do with big telescopes

in the coming future.

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