Recently, a team of astronomers reported that they noticed 72 quick Fast-Evolving Luminous Transients that were very bright in a survey.
These events may resemble supernovae in their ability to outshine an entire galaxy of stars, but, they fade away much faster than supernovae, on a timescale of days instead of weeks.
The groups findings were presented on April 3, 2018, at the European Week of Astronomy andSpace Science in Liverpool, U.K. by Miika Pursiainen of the University of Southampton.
Pursiainen and his collaborators say they’ve found the largest number of these quick events to date.
They found them in data from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program, observing from Cerro Tololo in the Chilean Andes.