2023-11-21 05:33:58
Artist’s impression of AT2022tsd, an explosion in a galaxy far, far away. Photo credit: Robert L. Hurt/Caltech/IPAC. Christian Garavaglia Meteored Argentina 21.11.2023 – 06:33 a.m. 6 min
After the explosive death of a distant star there was a active “stellar corpse” the likely source of repeated energetic explosions observed for months – a phenomenon that astronomers had never seen before, reports a team from Cornell University in new research published November 15 in the journal Nature has been published.
Die short, bright flasheswhich lasted only a few minutes and were just as powerful as the original explosion 100 days later, appeared following a rare type of stellar cataclysmknown as luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT).
The explosion of the “Tasmanian Devil”, examined by 15 telescopes around the world
Since his Discovery in 2018 Astronomers have speculated regarding what leads to such extreme explosions might lead to things that are much brighter than the violent extremes that massive stars normally experience, but in days instead of disappearing for weeks. The research team believes that the previously unknown explosion activity, examined by 15 telescopes around the world, confirms that the trigger must be a “stellar corpse”: a black hole or a neutron star.
“We don’t think anything else might cause such an explosion,” Anna YQ Ho, a professor of astronomy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement notice. “This ends years of debate regarding what is driving this type of explosion and demonstrates an unusually simple method for studying the activity of stellar ‘corpses,'” he added.
Anna YQ Ho, assistant professor of astronomy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Anna Ho is the lead author of the study, which was published alongside more than 70 co-authors. She helped with the Characterization of the LFBOT (officially as AT2022tsd referred to and nicknamed “the Tasmanian devil” Mistake) and the resulting pulses of light seen regarding a billion light-years from Earth. She wrote the computer program that discovered the phenomenon in September 2022 while studying half a million changes, or transients, captured daily in a cosmic survey at the Zwicky Transient Facility in California.
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In December 2022, Ho and his associate Daniel Perley (Liverpool John Moores University) and Ping Chen (Weizmann Institute of Science) to verify the new observations that Ping had made and analyzed: a series of five images, each several minutes long. As expected, there was nothing visible in the first image, but in the second image there was a light, followed by a very bright peak in the middle of the image, which quickly disappeared.
“Nobody knew what to say,” Ho recalls. “We’ve never seen anything like this, anything as fast and as intensely luminous as the original explosion months later, in either a supernova or an LFBOT,” she says.
Investigation of sudden brightness
To further study the sudden brightening, researchers turned to collaborators who contributed observations from more than a dozen telescopes, including one equipped with a high-speed camera. The Team examined previous data and ruled out other possible light sources.
Their analysis ultimately confirmed at least 14 irregular light pulses over a period of 120 days, which is likely only a fraction of the total, Ho said.
“Surprisingly, the source did not disappear as one would expect, but appeared briefly and repeatedly,” explains Ho. “LFBOTs are already a strange and exotic event, but this was even stranger,” he adds.
New discoveries regarding stellar life cycles
Which The exact processes that took place still need to be investigated, perhaps a black hole that deflects jets of stellar material outward at nearly the speed of light. Ho is confident that this research will advance the long-held goal of mapping the properties of living stars to predict how they will die and what kind of “corpse” they will produce.
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In the case of LFBOTs there are probably one fast rotation or a strong magnetic field the key components of their launch mechanism, says Ho. It is also possible that these are not conventional supernovae, but the Fusion of a star with a black hole. “We might be dealing with a completely different channel for cosmic catastrophes,” she emphasizes.
The unusual explosions promise new insights into stellar life cycles that are usually only observed in snapshots of different stages – star, explosion, debris – rather than as part of a single system, says Ho. Die LFBOTs might provide the opportunity to observe a star during its transition to the followinglife.
News reference:
Cornell University | Ho , AYQ , Perley , DA , Chen , P. et al. Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities. Nature (2023).
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