Astronomers still can't decipher the ‘Cow’, a mysterious explosion in deep space, Update
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON--An unusually bright glow in the sky that appeared suddenly last June has got astronomers in a frenzy. After months of study, they still aren’t sure what the object—officially called AT2018cow, but universally referred to as the ‘Cow”--is. But scientists have some ideas, which they offered here today at the American Astronomical Society meeting. Whatever it is, says astronomer Liliana Rivera Sandoval of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, “it’s super weird.” The Cow first appeared in telescope observations on 16 June, in what turned out to be a small galaxy about 200 million light years away. It was very bright and hadn’t been there the day before. That rapid appearance seemed to rule out a supernova, because such stellar explosions usually grow in brightness more slowly. “When we saw that we thought, let’s get on this,” says Dan Perley, an astronomer at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom. Astronomers initially assumed that the Cow was a m...
