The brightest yet X-ray glow from a cosmic “Cow” showed up a year post-burst. Only an actively eating black hole or an extremely magnetic neutron star could be responsible.
Then in April 2021, researchers with the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma space telescope, which studies X-ray light, alerted Yao and her colleagues to an interesting signal in SRG data from July 21–24, 2020, at the same spot in the sky. “I almost immediately realized that this might be another Cow-like event,” says Yao. The astronomers sprang to action and looked at that location with multiple other observatories in different kinds of light.
One of those observatories was the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope. In June 2021, a year after the original supernova blast, it captured X-rays from the same location. The source’s signal “was 10 times brighter than what I expected,” says Yao, and 200 times as bright as the original Cow was a year post-explosion.
Even more exciting was that the strengths of both the Chandra X-ray detection and the original SRG X-ray observations also changed within hours to days. That flaring characteristic, it turns out, can tell astronomers a lot. “X-rays give us information of what’s happening at the heart of these events,” says MIT astrophysicist DJ Pasham, who has studied the original Cow but was not part of this new study. “The duration of the flare gives you a sense of how compact or how big the object is.”
A compact object like an actively eating black hole or a rapidly spinning and highly magnetic neutron star would create the strong and variable X-ray signals Yao’s team saw, she says. These were the two most probableFurther observations and catching these objects earlier in the act with multiple types of light will help researchers learn more about this new class of supernovas and what type of star eventually explodes as a Cow.
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