Even the best of stars die in the end. The best stars live the longest lives.
They explode as brilliant supernovae after consuming all the hydrogen they have. The core is still in a black hole. Our universe is littered with small dark objects.
It's hard to detect stellar black holes. If the magnetic poles of the stars are aligned, they will be seen as pulsars.
Black holes are smaller and do not give off light of their own. When they consume the mass of a companion star, some appear as microquasars, but most would only be seen when they pass between us and a more distant star.
We haven't observed enough of these stellar remains to create an observed map of their location, but a recent study has modeled where we might find them.
They looked at the distribution of stars in the current universe to see how they might be tugged. The graveyard stars have had more time to move to new paths than the current stars.
The stellar remains experience a sort of blurring effect in their positions. The distribution of these stars in a plane is three times bigger than the visible one. One aspect of their distribution was surprising.
A third of the dead stars are being thrown out of the sky. A third of the stars in the model have experienced a close stellar encounter that has given them a speed boost.
The ghosts are leaving the cemetery.
The Milky Way is losing mass over time. It is known that small clusters of stars can evaporate, but the Milky Way is much larger, so you would think long-term evaporation would be less.
The model was surprised by the fact that the stellar remains are evenly distributed. Most stars should have a remnant within a century.
The closest stellar remnant is about 65 light years away. It's possible that we have a ghost in our backyard.
Rubin Observatory is one of the sky survey observatories that we are likely to catch microlensing events. Finally, we will be able to see the universe.
This article was published in the past. The original article is worth a read.
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