Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities

November 2023 • 2023Natur.623..927H

Authors • Ho, Anna Y. Q. • Perley, Daniel A. • Chen, Ping • Schulze, Steve • Dhillon, Vik • Kumar, Harsh • Suresh, Aswin • Swain, Vishwajeet • Bremer, Michael • Smartt, Stephen J. • Anderson, Joseph P. • Anupama, G. C. • Awiphan, Supachai • Barway, Sudhanshu • Bellm, Eric C. • Ben-Ami, Sagi • Bhalerao, Varun • de Boer, Thomas • Brink, Thomas G. • Burruss, Rick • Chandra, Poonam • Chen, Ting-Wan • Chen, Wen-Ping • Cooke, Jeff • Coughlin, Michael W. • Das, Kaustav K. • Drake, Andrew J. • Filippenko, Alexei V. • Freeburn, James • Fremling, Christoffer • Fulton, Michael D. • Gal-Yam, Avishay • Galbany, Lluís • Gao, Hua • Graham, Matthew J. • Gromadzki, Mariusz • Gutiérrez, Claudia P. • Hinds, K. -Ryan • Inserra, Cosimo • A J, Nayana • Karambelkar, Viraj • Kasliwal, Mansi M. • Kulkarni, Shri • Müller-Bravo, Tomás E. • Magnier, Eugene A. • Mahabal, Ashish A. • Moore, Thomas • Ngeow, Chow-Choong • Nicholl, Matt • Ofek, Eran O. • Omand, Conor M. B. • Onori, Francesca • Pan, Yen-Chen • Pessi, Priscila J. • Petitpas, Glen • Polishook, David • Poshyachinda, Saran • Pursiainen, Miika • Riddle, Reed • Rodriguez, Antonio C. • Rusholme, Ben • Segre, Enrico • Sharma, Yashvi • Smith, Ken W. • Sollerman, Jesper • Srivastav, Shubham • Strotjohann, Nora Linn • Suhr, Mark • Svinkin, Dmitry • Wang, Yanan • Wiseman, Philip • Wold, Avery • Yang, Sheng • Yang, Yi • Yao, Yuhan • Young, David R. • Zheng, WeiKang

Abstract • In recent years, certain luminous extragalactic optical transients have been observed to last only a few days¹. Their short observed duration implies a different powering mechanism from the most common luminous extragalactic transients (supernovae), whose timescale is weeks². Some short-duration transients, most notably AT2018cow (ref. ³), show blue optical colours and bright radio and X-ray emission⁴. Several AT2018cow-like transients have shown hints of a long-lived embedded energy source⁵, such as X-ray variability^6,7, prolonged ultraviolet emission⁸, a tentative X-ray quasiperiodic oscillation^9,10 and large energies coupled to fast (but subrelativistic) radio-emitting ejecta^11,12. Here we report observations of minutes-duration optical flares in the aftermath of an AT2018cow-like transient, AT2022tsd (the `Tasmanian Devil'). The flares occur over a period of months, are highly energetic and are probably nonthermal, implying that they arise from a near-relativistic outflow or jet. Our observations confirm that, in some AT2018cow-like transients, the embedded energy source is a compact object, either a magnetar or an accreting black hole.

Links

• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2023Natur.623..927H
• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10195
• DATA http://archive.eso.org/bin/ads2eso?2023Natur.623..927H
• DATA https://cda.harvard.edu/chaser?obsid=26641,26642,26643,26644,26645,26646,27639,27643,27950,27951
• DATA https://telbib.eso.org/detail.php?bibcode=2023Natur.623..927H
• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fs41586-023-06673-6