Bizarre rare space explosions have been spotted by scientists but they can't explain them
Liv Bridge
Featured Image Credit: NASA
Astronomers have spotted around a dozen weird explosions in space and can't explain why.
It's not every day scientists manage to spot 'booms' in the darkest, depths of space. In fact, astronomers had never seen anything like it before until 2018.
Six years ago, telescopes from Earth picked up a dazzlingly bright explosion from 200 millions light years away which was unlike any other before, far brighter (by about 100 times more) than the bog standard 'supernova' when stars explode.
Supernovae also usually take weeks to even months to come to an end, yet this one, after growing luminous and hot at breakneck speed to about the same size of our solar system, it vanished into nothing within just a few days, leaving scientists back on our home planet stumped.
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It was given the nickname 'the Cow' from its more formal label, AT2018cow, and since then space boffins have been on the look-out for other similar cosmic events.
To date, just a handful have been noted, each with their own animal-themed nickname, like 'the Koala' (ZTF18abvkwla), seen in 2018, 'the Camel' (ZTF20acigmel) spotted in 2020, 'the Tasmanian devil' (AT2022tsd) in 2022 and 2023's AT2023fhn, called 'the Finch' or 'Fawn'.
Each incident is recorded as LFBots - 'luminous fast blue optical transients' - which Anna Ho, an astronomer at Cornell University in New York says is because they are 'very luminous.'
The blue color comes from the explosion's unusually high temperature of around 72,000F which alters light to shift to the blue part of the spectrum, while O and T makes reference to the light spectrum (optical) and that they are short-lived (transient).
In the beginning, LFBots were considered to be failed supernovae, where stars try to explode but instead implode, creating a black hole at the core that meant they were consumed from the inside-out.
Now, however, a new theory has emerged on the scene - that undiscovered mid-sized mass black holes are sucking up stars that wander too close.
Black holes are the compact remains of exploded stars which are so dense that its gravity stops anything, even light, from escaping its singularity.
It comes as another LFBot was observed from a telescope in Liverpool in November by Ho and Perley, referred to as AT2024wpp (pending its animal name), which Ho says could end up as 'wasp,' reports BBC.
Perley added: "It's the best one since the Cow itself," noting how the 'Wasp' has been the brightest one since the 2018 discovery.
And like the hip new theory on the block, their observations likewise suggest the explosion was not caused by a failed supernova, though they admit the data is still being analysed.
Last year, Zheng Cao at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and colleagues returned to the drawing board to study the first LFBots and found it appeared as though remnants of a star was being swallowed up by an intermediate mass black hole.
"I believe our study supports the intermediate mass black holes nature of AT2018cow and similar LFBots," Cao said.
While the space pros are confident such black holes exist out there, no one has found concrete proof.
"The intermediate mass black hole model is the most exciting," Perley added. "It is still kind of debated in the community whether intermediate mass black holes really exist. The evidence has been quite sparing."
Well, if the recent research is to be believed, this mysterious type of black hole comes as just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that goes towards explaining one if the Universe's biggest riddles - dark matter. But for now, is still just a mystery.