The flattest explosion

An explosion the size of our solar system has stunned scientists because its shape – similar to an extremely flat disk – challenges everything we know about explosions in space. The observed explosion was a bright Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT) – an extremely rare type of explosion, much rarer than, say, supernovae. The first bright FBOT was discovered in 2018 and was nicknamed “the cow.”

Explosions of stars in the universe are almost always spherical, because the stars themselves are spheri...