[The Epoch Times, November 17, 2023](Comprehensive report by Epoch Times reporter Xia Yu) Space is full of various extreme phenomena, but the “Tasmanian devil” space explosion may be the most observed so far One of the strangest and rarest cosmic events has left scientists baffled.
Months after astronomers witnessed a distant star explode, they’ve discovered something they’ve never seen before: signs of vibrant life unleashed from the stellar remnant about a billion light-years from Earth. The brief, bright flare is as powerful as the original explosion that killed the star.
Astronomers call this celestial phenomenon the “Tasmanian Devil”. After they first discovered it in September 2022, they observed it exploding repeatedly.
But the initial stellar explosion that kills a star isn’t any typical supernova, an increasingly bright star that explodes and ejects most of its mass before dying. Instead, the “Tasmanian Devil” belongs to a rare type of explosion known as a fast blue optical transient (LFBOT). LFBOT emits bright blue light, reaches a peak brightness and disappears within a few days, and a supernova may It may take weeks or months to darken.
The first LFBOT was discovered in 2018 in a galaxy about 60 million parsecs (200 million light-years) away from Earth. It is 100 times brighter than a supernova, but dims rapidly within a few days, whereas the dimming process of a supernova takes weeks.
But the “Tasmanian Devil” not only violated LFBOT’s usual “live short and die young” characteristics, it exploded repeatedly within a few months, releasing energy flares hundreds of billions of times greater than those of stars such as the sun.
The “Tasmanian Devil” is officially labeled AT2022tsd. This latest discovery was observed by 15 telescopes around the world and was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“What’s surprising is that instead of gradually dimming as one would expect, the light source briefly brightens again, again and again,” said first author Anna Ho, an assistant professor at Cornell University. . LFBOT is already a weird and bizarre event, so this one is even weirder.”
The “Tasmanian Devil” experienced at least 14 irregular bright bursts in the 120 days after its first explosion, each lasting several minutes, and many subsequent flares were brighter than the previous ones.
“Such an explosion has never been seen in LFBOT before.” He said that each unexpected flash “is as powerful as the original LFBOT.”
“(LFBOT) emits more energy than an entire galaxy composed of hundreds of billions of stars, such as the Sun. The mechanism behind such a huge amount of energy is currently unclear.” Study co-author, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia ( Jeff Cooke, a professor at Australia’s Swinburne University, said in a statement, “But in this case, after the initial burst and subsidence, extreme explosions continued to occur, and they occurred very quickly – almost Within minutes, not weeks to months like a supernova.”
“No one really knows what to say,” He said. “We’ve never seen anything like this in any supernova or LFBOT before—so fast and as bright as the initial explosion months later. We This has never been seen in astronomy.”
“It pushes the limits of physics because it produces extremely high amounts of energy and the bursts are very short-lived,” Cook said. “There is a finite speed at which light travels. So the speed at which the light source bursts out and dies out limits the light source. size, meaning all this energy is produced by a relatively small light source.”
If it were a black hole, the object might be ejecting jets of material and launching them into space at nearly the speed of light.
Another possibility, He said, is that the initial explosion was triggered by an unconventional event, such as a star merging with a black hole, which could provide “an entirely different pathway to cosmic catastrophe.”
While the powerful chaos of the Tasmanian Devil event remains a mystery, astronomers believe it may provide some clues about how stars die and what exactly is left behind.
“Because this (stellar) corpse isn’t just sitting there; it’s active and doing things that we can detect,” He said. “We think these flares may be coming from these newly formed corpses, which gives us a way to A method of studying their characteristics when first formed.”
Editor in charge: Li Muen#
