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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

The Kepler planet-hunting telescope was designed to do one thing: gather data from a single portion of the sky often enough to catch rare, brief events. The events it was looking for were slight dips in light that happened as a planet passed in between its host star and Earth. But it captured other transient events as well. Some of these other events were supernovae—the explosion of massive stars—and Kepler captured two just as the explosion burst through their surface.

But at least one of the brief events Kepler observed was so odd it wasn't originally recognized as a supernova. It was only after the observatory's data was released to the entire research community that people started proposing that something so bright was most likely a supernova. Now, researchers are offering an analysis of why this event looked so strange.

[...] So what was so odd about KSN 2015K? While the object was clearly bright enough to be a supernova, it was on an accelerated schedule, taking only two days to reach peak brightness. It was already fading out after only a week, and it was gone at three weeks. By contrast, another recent supernova was still brightening roughly two weeks after it was first detected. More generally, this new event was about eight times faster than we'd expect from a type Ia supernova. This makes KSN 2015K a "fast evolving luminous transient," or FELT.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/kepler-caught-strange-supernova-sudden-surge-rapid-decay/

Also at The Register.

A fast-evolving luminous transient discovered by K2/Kepler (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0423-2) (DX)

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2