Professor Smartt is the scientific lead of the search for distant explosions with Pan-STARRS and his team analyse the data for unusual sources on a daily basis. The event was then confirmed by other observatories and data worldwide, including data from the Pan-STARRS telescope survey in Hawaii. How can an object become so luminous again so quickly? This is now our challenge to work out.’ĪT2022tsd was initially captured during a routine optical survey by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California. It is unprecedented to observe flares this bright over such short timescales – like a candle stuttering in outer space. ![]() Professor Stephen Smartt.Professor of Astrophysics Stephen Smartt (Department of Physics, University of Oxford), who helped discover AT2022tsd, said: ‘We have discovered an unusual event that has never been seen before, but data from many telescopes confirm these flares are real. Each of these flares was extremely energetic, reaching supernovae-like intensities. Instead of the light fading away, it peaked again several times after the initial explosion over extremely short minutes-long timescales. On 7 September 2022, a new FBOT (subsequently named AT2022tsd, the “Tasmanian Devil”) was discovered which displayed even more unusual behaviour. FBOTs are also much brighter, with up to 10 to 100 times the luminosity of a typical supernova. But whilst supernovae light up then fade gradually over weeks or months, FBOTs evolve much more rapidly, reaching peak brightness then fading again in a matter of days. Like supernovae, one theory for the origin of FBOTs is when stars much larger than our Sun explode at the end of their life. But with only a handful of FBOTs discovered to date, the mechanisms causing these super-bright events have remained a mystery. Since they were first discovered in 2018, astronomers have been fascinated by fast blue optical transients (FBOTs): extremely hot explosions in outer space, and amongst the brightest known optical phenomena in the universe. Professor Stephen Smartt, Department of Physics, University of Oxford. We hope more theoretical work will enable us to understand this emission better. ![]() The fast variability of the flares indicates that an object of small size is producing them, probably a black hole. It is a remarkable and unexpected discovery, but the fact that the flares were detected by a number of instruments proves it is a real, astrophysical phenomenon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |