Explosion the size of our solar system is the flattest ever seen by scientists

By Alice Clifford via SWNS

An explosion the size of our solar system 180 million light years away has baffled scientists by being the flattest ever seen.

Explosions in space are almost always expected to be spherical, as stars themselves are that shape, making this discovery challenge what astronomers know about space.

The blast was an extremely rare Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT). The first one was discovered in 2018 and was given the nickname “the cow” and only four others have ever been seen.

Scientists do not know how they occur but one potential explanation is that the stars themselves may have surrounded a dense disk.

They could also have come from material shed by a star just before it exploded or they may even have been failed supernovas.

Lead author Dr. Justyn Maund, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said: “Very little is known about FBOT explosions - they just don’t behave like exploding stars should, they are too bright and they evolve too quickly.

“Put simply, they are weird, and this new observation makes them even weirder.

“Hopefully this new finding will help us shed a bit more light on them - we never thought that explosions could be this aspherical.

“There are a few potential explanations for it: the stars involved may have created a disc just before they died or these could be failed supernovas, where the core of the star collapses to a blackhole or neutron star which then eats the rest of the star.

“What we now know for sure is that the levels of asymmetry recorded are a key part of understanding these mysterious explosions, and it challenges our preconceptions of how stars might explode in the Universe.”

Scientists made the discovery after spotting a flash of polarized light completely by chance.

They used the Liverpool Telescope in La Palma to measure the polarization of the blast using the astronomical equivalent of polaroid sunglasses.

Through this, they measured the shape of the explosion.

They were then able to use the data to reconstruct its 3D shape and map the edges of the blast, revealing just how flat it was.

The mirror of the Liverpool Telescope is only 2m in diameter, but by studying the polarization the astronomers were able to reconstruct the shape of the explosion as if the telescope had a diameter of about 750km.

Researchers will now undertake a new survey with the international Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.

They hope this will allow them to discover more FBOTs and further understand them.

The study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.