A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the universe's rarest explosions (opens in new tab)

Astronomers may have discovered one of the clearest examples yet of a rare "pair-instability" supernova. It is a catastrophic explosion thought to completely destroy some of the most massive stars in the universe, leaving behind no remnant. The paper outlining the properties of this rare explosion was posted to the arXiv preprint server on May 15.