A really weird and rare kind of cosmic kaboom just got weirder.
explosion billions of light years away Observed in 2022 Also known as the Tasmanian devil (AT2022tsd) was caught repeatedly flaring up with the strength of 100 billion suns (the same power as the initial explosion) for several months after the initial flash.
This explosion belongs to a rare category known as luminescent fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs), of which only a handful have been discovered. And the Tasmanian devil’s repeated behavior is the latest in a series of these LFBOTs doing really, really weird things.
“An event like this has never been witnessed before.” says astrophysicist Jeff Cook. He completed his PhD at Swinburne University of Technology and Australia’s ARC Gravitational Wave Discovery Center of Excellence (OzGrav).
LFBOT was first discovered in 2018 and later became known as Cow.some more It has since been brought upusually named after animals, but they’re just…weird.
They are incredibly bright, at least 10 times brighter than regular supernovae, and incredibly hot, giving them a bluish color.
The content is also very short. Supernovae typically reach a peak in brightness and then fade away over a period of weeks or months. LFBOT is like a slow camera flash deep in space. It will disappear again after just a few days.
They are so strange that astronomers wonder what causes them. Generally, the bright explosions we detect in the universe consist of dying stars going supernovae or neutron stars colliding with each other. The current best candidate for LFBOT is the formation of black holes in a rare type of nuclear collapse supernovae.
However, each LFBOT seems to have its own quirks. The cow exhibited an unusually flat, pancake-like outburst. Finch, discovered earlier this year, was found in intergalactic space about 50,000 light-years from the nearest galaxy. So the explanation needs to account for all these oddities.
The Tasmanian devil, according to a new analysis led by Cornell University astronomer Anna Ho and an international team of more than 70 co-authors. neutron star or black hole.
They used a new method to monitor the site where LFBOT was first detected on September 7, 2022, and detected at least 14 flares in the 120 days after the first explosion. And those were weird flares. It was at least as bright as the Tasmanian Devil itself, but it lasted only a few minutes.
“Surprisingly, rather than steadily dimming as expected, the light source briefly brightened again and again.” Mr. Ho says.. “LFBOT is already kind of a weird, exotic event, so this was even weirder.”
The exact cause of the flare is unknown, but the signs point to a compact object, similar to a black hole, researchers say.
“This pushes the boundaries of physics not only because of its extreme energy production, but also because of its short explosion duration.” Mr. Cook says. “Light travels at a finite speed, so the size of the light source is limited by how fast it can explode and disappear. This is because all this energy is generated from a relatively small source. It means there is.”
Black holes themselves do not emit light that we can detect, but there is a mechanism by which the presence of a black hole squeezes light out of nearby matter. For example, if the center of a massive star were to eject its outer shell and then collapse into a black hole, gas could be ejected from its outer shell. fall into a black hole.
When a black hole accretes matter, it directs it into a high-velocity jet, caught by magnetic field lines around the outside of the event horizon, and accelerated towards the poles, where it is launched into space as a stream of plasma. Flashes may be related to this accretion and ejection process. Alternatively, it may be related to other as yet unidentified astrophysical processes.
Whatever it is, the Tasmanian Devil is giving us a window into LFBOTs, black holes, and the life cycle of stars that we’ve probably never seen before.
“The corpse is [of the star] “It’s not just sitting there, it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” Ho says. “We think these flares may be coming from one of these newly formed cadavers, and this gives us a way to study the properties of the cadaver when it has just died. It has been formed.”
The survey results are natural astronomy.