A mysterious cosmic explosion created a brilliant flash of light in the space between the two Galaxies More than 3 billion light-years away.
Optical flash, which was one of the brightest bursts of blue light Universe But it only lasted a few days, and is the latest example of a rare series of short astronomical events called a “fast luminous blue optical event” (LFBOT).
LFBOTs are a complete mystery. The first object discovered was not observed until 2018. It was designated AT2018cow, and was placed in the spiral arm of its 200 million galaxy. Light year far. nickname “The cow“, was up to 100 times brighter than a normal supernova, and was also bright in radio waves, ultraviolet light, and X-rays. If it was a supernova, SupernovaHe behaved very strangely. Normally, a supernova stays bright for weeks, or even months, and has a recognizable spectrum. However, the cow faded away after a few days.
Related: Have scientists succeeded in solving the mystery of the super-bright “cow” exploding in space?
Similar bursts of light are detected about once a year, and are named after animals based on their last three letters. Other LFBOTs have been named the camel, the koala, and the Tasmanian devil. The newest LFBOT, discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California on April 10, has been named AT2023fhn and, thus, has been named “Finch.”
After LFBOT’s initial detection, a pre-planned series of observations were made with telescopes on Earth and indoors. space It has been enacted. The Gemini South Telescope in Chile measured Finch’s spectrum and found that it was 20,000 degrees Celsius (about 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit) — which is hot, but not as hot as some massive objects. stars And certainly not as hot as a supernova. Redshift Measurements place it about 3 billion light-years away, an enormous distance that only Earth can reach Hubble Space Telescope It can replace its host galaxy.
When it did, astronomers made a shocking observation: Finch had never existed in a galaxy at all.
All previous LFBOTs had been observed in the spiral arms of galaxies, but Hubble noted that Finch was in intergalactic space, about 50,000 light-years away from a large galaxy. Spiral galaxy And 15,000 light-years from a small galaxy.
Its location seems to contradict the possibility that it was a supernova of a massive star exploding. While there are rogue stars who are expelled from the galaxy into intergalactic space after an encounter with an alien Giant black holeMassive stars only live a few million years before they go supernova, which isn’t enough time for a star to get there.
“The more we know about LFBOTs, the more they surprise us,” says Ashley Krems, a research fellow at UCLA. European Space Agency “The LFBOT was recently observed in A statement. “We have shown that LFBOTs can occur at a long distance from the center of the nearest galaxy, and the Finch location is not what we would expect for any type of supernova.”
Chrisms and his team focus on two possible explanations. The first is that the Goldfinch was a flash of light caused by a star being torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole, which is an intermediate-mass black hole. Black hole With a mass ranging between 100 and a few thousand times that Sun mass. It is believed that medium-mass black holes exist in the hearts of some spherical stars Star clustersWhich lies on the outskirts of galaxies. Chrimes plans to use powerful optics for James Webb Space Telescope To search for any faint spherical clusters in the same location as the goldfinch.
Alternatively, Finch may have been a kilonova, the explosion resulting from the collision of two Neutron stars (Or sometimes between a neutron star and a black hole). Gravitational Wave Laser Interferometer Observatory It was not working at that time to detect any possible Gravitational wavesor ripples in space-time, from the merger of a neutron star ( The last monitoring began in May). At 3 billion light-years away, the goldfinch was probably too far away to be detected anyway. Not associated Gamma ray burst Verified.
“This discovery raises more questions than it answers,” Chrisms said. “More work is needed to find out which of the several possible explanations is correct.”
the the findings It has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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