Chené and his colleagues

 Chené and his colleagues

 used the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to discover the star system CPD-29 2176, located about 11,400 light-years from Earth. The team deduced that the binary star system contained a small, dense neutron star being orbited by a massive companion star that will likely collapse into a neutron star, itself, in the distant future.

Massive stars sometimes explode in dramatic supernovas, but the neutron star in this system was apparently left behind by a special class of supernova known as a stripped-down supernova, the researchers said. In this case, the once-mighty star lost much of its outer mass to its orbital partner before reaching the end of its life. Thus, when the star ran out of fuel and collapsed, it did so quietly and gently, without a massive explosion that would have kicked its partner out of orbit, as is often the case in binary systems.

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