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Birth of a Black Hole or Neutron Star Captured for First Time

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Birth of a black hole or neutron star captured for first time: Mysteriously bright glow of this summer's 'Cow' event gained international interest

On June 17, the ATLAS survey's twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or "The Cow," the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.

After combining several imaging sources, including hard X-rays and radio waves, the multi-institutional team now speculates that the telescopes captured the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. The stellar debris, approaching and swirling around the object's event horizon, caused the remarkably bright glow.

This rare event will help astronomers better understand the physics at play within the first moments of the creation of a black hole or neutron star. "We think that 'The Cow' is the formation of an accreting black hole or neutron star," said Northwestern's Raffaella Margutti, who led the research. "We know from theory that black holes and neutron stars form when a star dies, but we've never seen them right after they are born. Never."

White Dwarf munching Space Cow gives birth to black hole

RandomFactor writes:

According to this article:

A weirdly bright and brief blast dubbed "The Cow," which researchers first spotted last June, was likely generated by a newborn black hole or superdense stellar corpse called a neutron star, a new study reports.

Raffaella Margutti, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University in Illinois states that:

Based on its X-ray and UV [ultraviolet] emission, 'The Cow' may appear to have been caused by a black hole devouring a white dwarf

The explosion was designated variously ATLAS18qqn, SN 2018cow, AT2018cow and is pictured here. It was inevitably nicknamed "The Cow" and is relatively nearby at only 200 million light years (3.102e+16 Ice Hockey rinks) distance and with brightness between 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than a typical supernova.

The Cow supernova:

intrigued researchers from the start. It was incredibly bright — 10 to 100 times brighter than typical supernovae — and surprisingly brief, fading away after a mere two weeks or so.

The results of the new study on The Cow were announed on January 10th in a news conference during the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle.

Several other teams announced results concurrently and conclusions differ.

The properties of The Cow strain nearly all models we have tried to devise to explain it," Daniel Perley, an assistant professor of astronomy at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said in a different statement.

Hopefully the debate will be put out to pasture soon.

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