Author: Ryan Morrison for Mailonline

Published: December 13, 2021 at 11:00 EST | Updated: December 13, 2021 at 11:26 EST

Astronomers say that the explosion of a giant star and the creation of a black hole is the most likely explanation for the mysterious star explosion discovered in 2018.  

This explosion was observed by telescopes around the world as a bright blue flash from the spiral arms of a galaxy 200 million light-years away.

It is faster and brighter than any stellar burst recorded before, and is labeled "AT2018cow" on the notes, but is now simply called "The Cow".

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has since detected hundreds of millions of consistent X-ray pulses in the signal, which they say is "strong evidence" that it came from a star exploding into a black hole. 

According to the researchers, it produced a relatively compact black hole with a mass less than 800 times the mass of the sun and a diameter of no more than 600 miles.

They explained that this opens up the possibility of using "transient" events (such as these bright bursts) to discover "small black holes and small neutron stars" in the future. 

According to astronomers, a huge star exploded and created a black hole, which is the most likely explanation for the mysterious star burst that was first discovered in 2018 

The brightest fast blue optical transient (FBOT) is a mysterious explosion outside the river, which may represent a new phenomenon.

They reach their maximum brightness within a week, take months to decline and have unusual optical characteristics. 

This makes it difficult to explain them in the context of the collapse of the cores of massive stars in supernovae.

AT2018cow is an extreme example of FBOT's rapid evolution and high brightness.

Research on the X-ray pulse associated with the "cow" showed that it came from a "compact" black hole or neutron star that swallowed its origin star from the inside out.

Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology saw the "stroboscopic pulse" of high-energy X-rays, hidden in this pulse hundreds of millions of smaller pulses, happening "like a clockwork" every 4.4 milliseconds for 60 days.  

They used these data to calculate that the only viable source of this phenomenon was an object that was no more than 600 miles wide and had a mass of 800 suns — leaving only a small black hole or neutron star as the source. 

Neutron stars have a very small radius and very high density. They are mainly composed of tightly packed neutrons. They are formed by the gravitational collapse of a large star in a supernova explosion, but they are not large enough to collapse into a black hole. 

The new discovery shows that the "cow" is the product of a dying beginning, it collapses into a black hole or a neutron star, and continues to swallow the surrounding matter, swallowing the star from the inside and releasing a "huge burst of energy".  

Dheeraj'DJ' Pasham, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author, said: "We are likely to have discovered the birth of a dense object in a supernova."

"This happens in a normal supernova, but we have never seen it before because it is such a chaotic process. 

"We think this new evidence opens up the possibility of searching for small black holes or small neutron stars." 

The "bull" in the name of this phenomenon is a random coincidence in the astronomical naming process and does not have any specific meaning.

For example, "aaa" refers to the first astronomical transient discovered in 2018, and astronomers discovered multiple "rapid outbursts" during the year. 

However, "cow" is one of the few such signals observed in real time, and its powerful flash—100 times brighter than a typical supernova—was discovered in a survey in Hawaii and tracked around the world .

"This is very exciting because a lot of data is starting to accumulate," Pasham said.   

'The energy is several orders of magnitude higher than a typical core collapse supernova. The question is, what can produce this extra energy?

The explosion was observed by telescopes around the world as a bright blue flash from the spiral arms of a galaxy 200 million light-years away.

The neutron star is the core of the Death Star collapsing and burning.

When the big stars reach the end of their lives, their cores will collapse, blowing off the outer layers of the stars.

This leaves an extremely dense object called a neutron star, which compresses more mass than the sun contains into the size of a city.

The mass of neutron stars may usually be 500,000 times the mass of the earth, but their diameter is only about 20 kilometers (12 miles).

A small amount of matter from this star will be as heavy as Mount Everest.

They are very hot, possibly reaching 1 million degrees, are highly radioactive, and have an incredibly strong magnetic field.

Professor Patrick Sutton, dean of the Department of Gravitational Physics at Cardiff University, said that this makes them arguably the harshest environment in the universe today.

Dense celestial bodies, especially their cores, are the key to our understanding of the heavy elements of the universe.

The original theory of its origin is entirely derived from the optical data of observations discovered in 2018, which includes the stripping of medium-mass black holes from passing stars.

Optical telescopes cannot resolve the data hidden in the pulse, so Pasham turned to X-ray data.

"This signal is very close and very bright in X-rays, which caught my attention," Pasham explained. 

"For me, the first thing that comes to mind is that some truly vibrant phenomena are producing X-rays. So, I want to test the idea of ​​a black hole or dense object in the core of a cow.

It was studied by X-rays by NASA's Neutron Star Interior Component Detector (NICER), which is an X-ray monitoring telescope on the International Space Station.

NICER started observing the cow about five days after it was first detected by the optical telescope, and monitored the signal for the next 60 days. 

Parsham and colleagues reviewed data from NICER to determine the X-ray signals emitted near The Cow and confirmed that these emissions did not come from other sources, such as instrument noise or cosmic background phenomena. 

They focused on X-rays and found that Cow seemed to emit pulses at a frequency of 225 Hz or every 4.4 milliseconds.

He identified the frequency of the pulse and said that it can be used to calculate the size of the cause of the pulse, because it cannot be greater than the distance covered by the speed of light in 4.4 milliseconds. 

Pasham said: "The only thing that can be so small is a dense object-a neutron star or a black hole."

The team further calculated that based on the energy emitted by The Cow, its mass should not exceed 800 solar masses.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has since detected hundreds of millions of consistent X-ray pulses in the signal, which they say is "strong evidence that it came from a star exploding into a black hole." 

"This excludes the idea that the signal comes from the black hole in the middle," Passham said.

In addition to determining the source of this particular signal, Pasham said that this study shows that X-ray analysis of FBOT and other superbright phenomena may be a new tool for studying baby black holes.

Pasham said: "Whenever a new phenomenon appears, people are excited to discover that it can tell us new things about the universe." 

"For FBOT, we have shown that we can study their pulsations in detail, which is impossible in optics. Therefore, this is a new way to understand these newly born compact objects.

The research results have been published in the journal "Natural Astronomy". 

Black holes are so dense, and their gravity is so strong that no radiation of any kind can escape them—not even light.

They act as a powerful source of gravity, sucking away the surrounding dust and gas. Their strong gravitation is believed to be the cause of the surrounding stars in the galaxy.

How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe that when a huge cloud of gas 100,000 times larger than the sun collapses into a black hole, they may form.

Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form larger supermassive black holes, which are located at the center of every known massive galaxy.

Or, the supermassive black hole seed may come from a giant star with a mass about 100 times the sun, which eventually forms a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.

When these giant stars die, they also become "supernovae," which is a huge explosion that expels the material from the outer layers of the star into deep space. 

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