AT2018cow tagged posts

The discovery, based on an usual event dubbed ‘the Cow,’ may offer astronomers a new way to spot infant compact objects. A powerful cosmic burst dubbed AT2018cow, or ‘the Cow,’ was much faster and brighter than any stellar explosion astronomers had seen. They have now determined it was likely a product of a dying star that, in collapsing, gave birth to a compact object in the form of a black hole or neutron star.

In June of 2018, telescopes around the world picked up a brilliant blue flash from the spiral arm of a galaxy 200 million light years away...

Mysteriously bright glow of this summer’s ‘Cow’ event gained international interest. A Northwestern University-led international team is getting closer to understanding the mysteriously bright object that burst in the northern sky this summer.

On June 17, the ATLAS survey’s twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or “The Cow,” the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.

After combining several imaging sources, including ha...