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

description: 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.
description: 79 pages, 3 figures (main text) + 7 figures (extended data) + 2 figures (supplementary information). Published online in Nature on 15 November 2023