Bibcode
Ho, Anna Y. Q.; Perley, Daniel A.; Chen, Ping; Schulze, Steve; Dhillon, Vik; Kumar, Harsh; Suresh, Aswin; Swain, Vishwajeet; Bremer, Michael; Smartt, Stephen J.; Anderson, Joseph P.; Anupama, G. C.; Awiphan, Supachai; Barway, Sudhanshu; Bellm, Eric C.; Ben-Ami, Sagi; Bhalerao, Varun; de Boer, Thomas; Brink, Thomas G.; Burruss, Rick; Chandra, Poonam; Chen, Ting-Wan; Chen, Wen-Ping; Cooke, Jeff; Coughlin, Michael W.; Das, Kaustav K.; Drake, Andrew J.; Filippenko, Alexei V.; Freeburn, James; Fremling, Christoffer; Fulton, Michael D.; Gal-Yam, Avishay; Galbany, Lluís; Gao, Hua; Graham, Matthew J.; Gromadzki, Mariusz; Gutiérrez, Claudia P.; Hinds, K. -Ryan; Inserra, Cosimo; A J, Nayana; Karambelkar, Viraj; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Kulkarni, Shri; Müller-Bravo, Tomás E.; Magnier, Eugene A.; Mahabal, Ashish A.; Moore, Thomas; Ngeow, Chow-Choong; Nicholl, Matt; Ofek, Eran O.; Omand, Conor M. B.; Onori, Francesca; Pan, Yen-Chen; Pessi, Priscila J.; Petitpas, Glen; Polishook, David; Poshyachinda, Saran; Pursiainen, Miika; Riddle, Reed; Rodriguez, Antonio C.; Rusholme, Ben; Segre, Enrico; Sharma, Yashvi; Smith, Ken W.; Sollerman, Jesper; Srivastav, Shubham; Strotjohann, Nora Linn; Suhr, Mark; Svinkin, Dmitry; Wang, Yanan; Wiseman, Philip; Wold, Avery; Yang, Sheng; Yang, Yi; Yao, Yuhan; Young, David R.; Zheng, WeiKang
Bibliographical reference
Nature
Advertised on:
11
2023
Journal
Citations
5
Refereed citations
2
Description
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.