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It was not a bird. It was not a plane. It Was a super something, but what kind of thing is still quite literally up in the air.
"Pretty much everything about their emission is something we have not seen before," said Iair Arcavi, a physicist at the University of California.
"Cow," astronomers are calling it, was a massively bright explosion 200 million light years away. Stephen Smartt, an astronomer at Queen's University in the US, was first to notice the explosion.
"It popped up out of nowhere," he said. At first, he thought it was a run-of-the-mill stellar flare in our galaxy, until he realized it was much farther away. That meant it was unusually bright. "It was 11 o'clock on Sunday night, and I said to myself, 'I better tell everybody about this,'" Smartt continued. He feels an alert, and the astronomy world took notice.
"Everybody was down what they were doing up to that point," explained Daniel Perley, a scientist at Liverpool's John Moores University in the UK's Smartt named after the explosion following an alphabetical protocol that, by chance weird, spit out AT2018cow, or "Cow" if you're an astronomer who likes nicknames.
Cow looking like a supernova – a giant star ending her life with an explosion. Except Cow was between 10 and 100 times brighter than a regular supernova. And most of the time, supernovae slowly amp up to the explosion. But Cow was different. Cow came out of nowhere and took a few days to reach maximum brightness.
All that meant Cow was something out of the ordinary. It could have been a neutron star being born, or something else entirely. Scientists hope this rare chance to see such a massive star exploding will help us understand the types of cosmic events that birthed our own world.
The materials for planet is made of giant star explosions, yet we still know very little about them. In understanding these epic origins, we may come to understand more about Earth and our own origins. Massive stars are our grandparents, and the Earth is our parent. Perhaps appreciating and learning more about this issue and respect for both the cosmic ancestors in the sky and the one under our feet.
Supernova is all the time, but this one was different.
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