Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities.
Nature 623:7989 (2023) 927-931
Authors:
Anna YQ Ho, Daniel A Perley, Ping Chen, Steve Schulze, Vik Dhillon, Harsh Kumar, Aswin Suresh, Vishwajeet Swain, Michael Bremer, Stephen J Smartt, Joseph P Anderson, GC Anupama, Supachai Awiphan, Sudhanshu Barway, Eric C Bellm, Sagi Ben-Ami, Varun Bhalerao, Thomas de Boer, Thomas G Brink, Rick Burruss, Poonam Chandra, Ting-Wan Chen, Wen-Ping Chen, Jeff Cooke, Michael W Coughlin, Kaustav K Das, Andrew J Drake, Alexei V Filippenko, James Freeburn, Christoffer Fremling, Michael D Fulton, Avishay Gal-Yam, Lluís Galbany, Hua Gao, Matthew J Graham, Mariusz Gromadzki, Claudia P Gutiérrez, K-Ryan Hinds, Cosimo Inserra, Nayana A J, Viraj Karambelkar, Mansi M Kasliwal, Shri Kulkarni, Tomás E Müller-Bravo, Eugene A Magnier, Ashish A Mahabal, Thomas Moore, Chow-Choong Ngeow, Matt Nicholl, Eran O Ofek, Conor MB Omand, Francesca Onori, Yen-Chen Pan, Priscila J Pessi, Glen Petitpas, David Polishook, Saran Poshyachinda, Miika Pursiainen, Reed Riddle, Antonio C Rodriguez, Ben Rusholme, Enrico Segre, Yashvi Sharma, Ken W Smith, Jesper Sollerman, Shubham Srivastav, Nora Linn Strotjohann, Mark Suhr, Dmitry Svinkin, Yanan Wang, Philip Wiseman, Avery Wold, Sheng Yang, Yi Yang, Yuhan Yao, David R Young, WeiKang Zheng
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 variability6,7, prolonged ultraviolet emission8, a tentative X-ray quasiperiodic oscillation9,10 and large energies coupled to fast (but subrelativistic) radio-emitting ejecta11,12. 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.
