Strange ‘space cow’ explosion may have been the birth of a black hole

By Leah Crane

Alamy/NASA/JPL-Caltech

A strange explosion in space is starting to reveal its secrets. In 2018, astronomers spotted an extraordinarily fast and bright explosion unlike anything we had ever seen before, and now they are starting to narrow down what could have caused it.

The explosion was given the official designation AT2018cow – a listing based on the alphabetical order of objects reported in the Astronomer’s Telegram – and nicknamed “the Cow”. It took just a few days to reach its peak brightness after it began to explode, whereas most …