A mystery burst from space has been dubbed “the cow” Alamy
Something is exploding incredibly quickly in the sky, and astronomers are scrambling to figure out what it is. On 17 June, the twin ATLAS telescopes in Hawaii in space that hadn’t been there when they’d checked about two days before.
Most supernovae take a few weeks or even longer to reach their full brightness, but this explosion took days. “It really just appeared out of nowhere,” says Kate Maguire at Queen’s University Belfast, who is part of the ATLAS team. Its peak…
