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Journal Article

Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities

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Chen,  Ting-Wan
High Energy Astrophysics, MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Ho, A. Y. Q., Perley, D. A., Chen, P., Schulze, S., Dhillon, V., Kumar, H., et al. (2023). Minutes-duration optical flares with supernova luminosities. Nature, 623, 927-931. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06673-6.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000E-66A0-A
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.