“Somewhere,” said Carl Sagan, “something incredible is waiting to be known” –“I’ve never seen anything like this before in the local universe,” said Stephen Smartt, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast and a lead scientist for the Hawaii-based ATLAS survey, about “something incredible” –a mysterious cataclysm in a neighboring galaxy that rocked the world’s astronomy community with its discovery on June 16, 2018.
“Ten Times as Bright as an Ordinary Supernova”
“It popped up out of nowhere,” says Smartt about the spectacular stellar explosion, weirdly named “The Cow,” that has offered an unprecedented window on the collapse of a star that became unbelievably bright essentially overnight. In the course of just three days, AT2018cow became about 10 times as bright as a normal supernova with a jet of particles moving close to the speed of light. But the Cow was no ordinary supernova, reaching its peak brightness in days, not weeks.