An Exploding Space Cow Could Be Linked to a Newborn Black Hole

The first time we’ve caught a baby black hole in action

By Neel V. Patel

The Cow was what’s called a transient astronomical event, where an object or phenomenon exhibits an extremely short duration (anywhere from seconds to years, which sounds broad — but in cosmic terms, pretty much anything less than several million years is a blink of an eye). And when the giant bright flash was first spotted, nobody knew what to make of it.

“At the time, from the information that was here, we knew there was a force, and it was a brightening flash, but it was not clear whether the source was in our own galaxy or not,” says Raffaella Margutti, an astronomer at Northwestern University and the lead author of the new paper detailing the findings. Another research team was able to verify the Cow was not part of our own galaxy — it sprang up in the CGCG 137–068 galaxy, which is 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. From then on, astronomers knew for certain they had stumbled upon the closest transient object of its kind ever found.

Initially, many suspected the Cow was a supernova, but the luminosity was off the scales — about 10 to 100 times brighter than expected, which would have made it one of the brightest supernovae on record. It was also spewing out particles at 10 percent the speed of light, which is much faster than exploding stars are capable of. And it was bizarrely, rapidly peaking as scientists were watching it, beginning to wane in just over two…

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