American astronomers from Cornell University have discovered for the first time a cosmic event that could turn into a new type of stellar catastrophe. Observations have shown that a distant star 1 billion light-years from Earth has somehow returned to life after the explosion that killed it. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Nature.
According to scientists, the object, called AT2022tsd, continued to emit powerful bursts of energy for 120 days, each lasting several minutes and with a power comparable to the initial explosion. The researchers concluded that they were dealing with an extremely rare phenomenon known as a fast blue optical transient (LFBOT). However, the intensity and duration of AT2022tsd bursts were greater than those previously recorded by LFBOT.
“Nobody knew what to say. We’d never seen anything like it in a supernova or LFBOT before—something as fast and bright as the first explosion a few months later. Surprisingly, instead of fading out as expected, the source briefly brightened again. This “It happened over and over again. LFBOTs themselves are an exotic phenomenon, so this was even weirder,” says the study’s lead author, Anna Ho.
Astronomers aim to find out exactly what causes such unusual behavior of the exploding star. They suspect that the source of the emissions may be a nearby black hole whose magnetic field directs jets of remaining matter from the star.
Earlier astronomers I learnedWhether the solar system is threatened by the visit of a wandering star in 29 thousand years.