" … astronomers are now beginning to come around to the idea that some stars that produce black holes may do so without a supernova explosion."

This reminds me of one science fiction movie in the “Star Trek” universe where “Mr. Spock” was supposed to stop one supernova explosion by initiating a black hole inside the star that would produce the supernova.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(2009_film)

based on this, more to the point, article

Of course aliens just stopped the explosion.

/s

seems to me astronomy needs AI trained on elemental physics to sift all the data for patterns. more eyes the better.