New York (PTI): Astronomers in the US have started monitoring about a million missive stars to find out if any suddenly winks out, seemingly without a trace.

A team, led by Christopher Kochanek of the Ohio State University in Columbus, is watching for the vanishing stars in 30 nearby galaxies using a 8.4-metre Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona.

According to the astronomers, such a disappearing act would support a theory that some massive stars simply implode when they die, rather than exploding in brilliant supernovae or gamma-ray bursts.

In fact, they plan to take images of the galaxies twice every year, watching for the sudden disappearance of the red supergiants. By watching one million stars, the team hopes to catch about one stellar death per year in their survey, which will last five years.

"There's no guarantee that you'll find these things -- because it could just be that they all do a supernova at some level. But that's no reason not to give it a try.

"If a star seems to disappear, the team will try to confirm the formation of a black hole by looking for X-rays emitted by stray bits of matter falling into the black hole," the 'New Scientist' quoted Kochanek as saying.