![]() Hester (Arizona State University)/NASAĮven if the Cow's debris were entirely nickel-56, that wouldn't be enough fuel to power the observed explosion. The blast wave slams into clouds of interstellar gas, causing it to glow and revealing information about the composition of the gas. The formation shown here marks the outer edge of an expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion that occurred about 15,000 years ago. This 1991 image shows a small portion of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant. A team of astronomers using Hawaii's ATLAS telescopes saw it on June 16, 2018, and flagged the object to other astronomers on June 17-triggering a rush of telescopes turning to point at the explosion. It's called “the Cow” because of its formal, auto-generated name AT2018cow. ![]() The Cow exploded in the outskirts of CGCG 137-068, a dwarf spiral galaxy about 200 million light-years from Earth. Where is the Cow, and why is it called that? So what do we know about the Cow, and why has it been so hard for astronomers to describe? We've got you covered. And other teams studying the Cow have proposed alternative explanations for its unusual behavior. The team's data, captured in multiple wavelengths of light, could also mean that a massive star collapsed into a neutron star, a kind of dense stellar corpse. Margutti and her colleagues presented their work this week at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, and will soon be publishing their findings in the Astrophysical Journal. “This is the target we've been waiting for for years,” says team leader Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University.
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