Three years ago, astronomers bore witness to a strange bright blue flare coming out of the spiral arm of a faraway galaxy 200 million light-years away. A survey in Hawaii was the first to see it, so it promptly sent out global alerts telling other telescopes to turn their giant eyes toward it.
And when they did that, they saw a dazzling flash 10 times brighter than a typical supernova before it faded over months, with leading theories speculating that the explosion may have created a subject like a black hole or neutron star.
Scientists called this mysterious stellar explosion 'the Cow', or AT2018cow, and now, they may finally have an explanation for what caused it in the first place.
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