{"id":608749,"date":"2026-07-28T19:43:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/608749\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T19:43:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:43:14","slug":"fast-blue-optical-transients-still-defy-explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/608749\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast blue optical transients still defy explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sky surveys keep catching a kind of cosmic explosion that astronomers can&#8217;t explain. They call them <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fast_blue_optical_transient\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">fast blue optical transients<\/a>, or FBOTs: blasts as luminous as a supernova, or brighter, but flaring and fading far faster, and glowing a distinctive blue.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They are genuinely rare, going off at less than a thousandth the rate of ordinary core-collapse supernovae \u2014 the explosions that mark the death of a massive star. Most were first spotted at enormous cosmological distances, but a handful have turned up closer to home. The best-studied is a 2018 event catalogued as AT2018cow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What actually produces them is unsettled. Astronomers aren&#8217;t even agreed on a definition; the class is pinned down by what the explosions look like rather than by any known mechanism behind them. The more examples astronomers collect, the less alike they look. FBOTs may be several kinds of explosion that happen to resemble each other.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Previously:<\/strong><br \/>\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2024\/08\/29\/source-of-famed-wow-signal-likely-found.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Source of famed Wow! signal likely found<\/a><br \/>\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2021\/01\/01\/scientists-investigate-radio-beam-from-the-direction-of-a-nearby-star.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Scientists investigate radio beam from the direction of a nearby star<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sky surveys keep catching a kind of cosmic explosion that astronomers can&#8217;t explain. They call them fast blue&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[271],"tags":[582,1025,18,19,17,75741,452,133,451,3517],"class_list":["post-608749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-astronomy","tag-astrophysics","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mysteries","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-space","tag-supernova"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116999317750997352","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}