Mystery ‘whippet’ space explosion is the brightest of its kind
“The Whippet”, as imagined by the New Scientist picture desk NASA/muratart/Shutterstock/Adobe Stock A sudden, mysterious burst of bright light in the sky could be from a black hole devouring a vast, unusually bare star. In 2018, astronomers spotted a new kind of cosmic explosion that became brighter more quickly than any other. The flash, called AT2018cow or “the Cow” for short, took only a few days to reach its peak brightness, rather than the weeks that are required for typical supernovae. There was no initial obvious explanation for such a burst, and in the years since the Cow was first discovered, we have seen only a handful of other explosions like these, which are collectively called fast blue optical transients (FBOTs). Their origin remains a mystery. Now, Jialian Liu at Tsinghua University in China and his colleagues think that a recent cosmic flash, which is the brightest of any FBOT so far, must be the result of an exotic star, more than 30 times the mass of our sun, that has lost its outer layers …
