John Bashar, Bob Zimmerman, he keeps the website behind the black

is here to introduce us to a mystery.

It's the sort of wonderful overwhelming mystery that will not easily be solved, but it's

nice to know the limits of astronomy.

It, Bob, calls it the baffling blue of galaxies.

What is it, Bob?

Good evening again.

Good evening, John.

It's called a, it's got a really terrible name the Australians gave it.

It's called the luminous fast blue optical transient, an LF bot, oh god.

But what it is is, you know, in the last decade, astronomers have put together a bunch

of ground-based telescopes, not big telescopes, but designed to robotically survey the sky

on a regular, regular basis.

So that transient short-term events and supernovas, which are longer events, are spotted regularly.

So they've been able to discover a lot of transient short-term events in space that

they never would have seen in the past.

And this LF bot, these blue fast luminous optical transient, are one of those recent discoveries.

And they generally, they're not a lot of them that have been spotted.

They generally only last a day or so, where you suddenly see a burst of light and energy.

And then it goes away a few days later.

Supernovas, for example, the burst happens, but it might take a year or two before it fades

off.

...