Throughout the universe, unseen stars may be dying in high-energy explosions, and new research suggests how scientists might detect these unseen catastrophes. In a paper published June 28 on the arXiv preprints database, a team of astrophysicists explored what would happen when bosonic stars, large theoretical objects made of invisible dark matter, reached the end of their lives. The result, they wrote, is a massive explosion similar to a supernova, only invisible: a “bosenova.” the unseen universe Dark matter is a mysterious substance that makes up more than 85% of the mass of almost all galaxies in the universe. While astronomers have found multiple lines of evidence pointing to their existence, all of those lines depend on the gravitational influence of dark matter on normal matter. We have yet to detect the presence of dark matter in another way, so the identity of the particle responsible for the dark matter remains in doubt.