Journal Article

Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities

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

2023

Overview

In recent years, certain luminous extragalactic optical transients have been observed to last only a few days 1 . Their short observed duration implies a different powering mechanism from the most common luminous extragalactic transients (supernovae), whose timescale is weeks 2 . Some short-duration transients, most notably AT2018cow (ref.  3 ), show blue optical colours and bright radio and X-ray emission 4 . Several AT2018cow-like transients have shown hints of a long-lived embedded energy source 5 , such as X-ray variability 6 , 7 , prolonged ultraviolet emission 8 , 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. Observations of optical flares from AT2022tsd (the ‘Tasmanian Devil’) show that they have durations on the timescale of minutes, occur over a period of months, are highly energetic, are probably nonthermal and have supernova luminosities.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 639/33/34/4118 / 639/33/34/4121 / 639/33/34/4127 / 639/33/34/864 / Astrophysics / Black holes / Data processing / Deposition / Energy / Energy sources / Flares / Humanities and Social Sciences / Magnetars / multidisciplinary / Physics / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Supernova / Supernovae / Telescopes / Transients (astronomy) / X-ray astronomy / X-ray emissions / X-rays