00:03Fast blue optical transients or f-bots are energetic explosions in space, but they're
00:08also extremely rare. In fact, only five have ever been detected to date. But the most recent one
00:13that occurred around 180 million light years away is even stranger. That's because it didn't
00:18explode spherically like, well, every other explosion ever. It seems to have exploded in
00:23a 2D disk. Lead researcher on the project, astrophysicist Justin Mond, had this to say
00:28about it. Very little is known about f-bot explosions, but they just don't behave like
00:33exploding stars should. They're too bright and they evolve too quickly. Put simply,
00:37they're weird. And this new observation makes them even weirder. While they are a bit baffled
00:41by the discovery, they do have a couple of guesses about why an aspherical explosion could have
00:46occurred. The stars that exploded could have formed a disk already ahead of the explosion,
00:50spiraling around one another ahead of a collision like this. Or the core of the star could have
00:55collapsed, forming either a matter-swallowing black hole or even a neutron star. The explosion
01:00was also 10 times brighter than your average supernova as well, leaving scientists scratching
01:04their heads from several angles. With Mond adding, what we know for sure is that the levels of asymmetry
01:09recorded are a key part of understanding these mysterious explosions, and it challenges our
01:14preconceptions of how stars might explode in the universe.
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