Minutes-duration Optical Flares with Supernova Luminosities
Abstract
In recent years, certain luminous extragalactic optical transients have been observed to last only a few days. Their short observed duration implies a different powering mechanism from the most common luminous extragalactic transients (supernovae) whose timescale is weeks. Some short-duration transients, most notably AT2018cow, display blue optical colours and bright radio and X-ray emission. Several AT2018cow-like transients have shown hints of a long-lived embedded energy source, such as X-ray variability, prolonged ultraviolet emission, a tentative X-ray quasiperiodic oscillation, and large energies coupled to fast (but subrelativistic) radio-emitting ejecta. 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 likely 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.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2311.10195,
title = {Minutes-duration Optical Flares with Supernova Luminosities},
author = {Anna Y. Q. Ho and Daniel A. Perley and Ping Chen and Steve Schulze and Vik Dhillon and Harsh Kumar and Aswin Suresh and Vishwajeet Swain and Michael Bremer and Stephen J. Smartt and Joseph P. Anderson and G. C. Anupama and Supachai Awiphan and Sudhanshu Barway and Eric C. Bellm and Sagi Ben-Ami and Varun Bhalerao and Thomas de Boer and Thomas G. Brink and Rick Burruss and Poonam Chandra and Ting-Wan Chen and Wen-Ping Chen and Jeff Cooke and Michael W. Coughlin and Kaustav K. Das and Andrew J. Drake and Alexei V. Filippenko and James Freeburn and Christoffer Fremling and Michael D. Fulton and Avishay Gal-Yam and Lluís Galbany and Hua Gao and Matthew J. Graham and Mariusz Gromadzki and Claudia P. Gutiérrez and K-Ryan Hinds and Cosimo Inserra and Nayana A. J. and Viraj Karambelkar and Mansi M. Kasliwal and Shri Kulkarni and Tomás E. Müller-Bravo and Eugene A. Magnier and Ashish A. Mahabal and Thomas Moore and Chow-Choong Ngeow and Matt Nicholl and Eran O. Ofek and Conor M. B. Omand and Francesca Onori and Yen-Chen Pan and Priscila J. Pessi and Glen Petitpas and David Polishook and Saran Poshyachinda and Miika Pursiainen and Reed Riddle and Antonio C. Rodriguez and Ben Rusholme and Enrico Segre and Yashvi Sharma and Ken W. Smith and Jesper Sollerman and Shubham Srivastav and Nora Linn Strotjohann and Mark Suhr and Dmitry Svinkin and Yanan Wang and Philip Wiseman and Avery Wold and Sheng Yang and Yi Yang and Yuhan Yao and David R. Young and WeiKang Zheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.10195},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
79 pages, 3 figures (main text) + 7 figures (extended data) + 2 figures (supplementary information). Published online in Nature on 15 November 2023