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A cow, a camel and a finch exploded in space. What is going on?

Jonathan O’Callaghan
New York Times·
5 mins to read
A cow, a camel and a finch exploded in space. What is going on?
An artist's illustration of a supernova explosion. Luminous fast blue optical transients, or LFBOTs, are much brighter than supernovas. Photo / European Southern Observatory

What do a cow, a koala, a camel, a Tasmanian devil and now a finch all have in common?

It’s not the plot of a new movie in the Madagascar series. They are nicknames given to a weird class of space explosions scientists can’t explain.

“We’ve been naming these things

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