I'm

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Oh Thank you. I'm Astronomycast, Episode 782, Luminous, fast blue optical transits. Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos. We hope you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of the universe today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gaya, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of Cosmon Quest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?

It is, we have our first sign of spring.

The snowballs, the little tiny white bulbs have come up.

They have bloomed.

They have bloomed through the snow, which is what they're supposed to do.

And so we've had our first, our first bulbs of spring.

Yeah, we haven't had those yet.

All of my bulbs are sort of peeking through the ground now, through the ground layer, but

no, no flowers yet.

But I'm, you know, probably just a week or two away.

And flowers on my, on my trees, but I'm, you know, probably just a week or two away. And flowers on my,

on my trees, on my cherry trees. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Modern astronomy has found new ways that the universe can surprise us. Here's one, which astronomers have called

luminous, fast, blue optical transits. They're kind of like

supernova. They're kind of like gamma ray burst, but they're not like them. So what are they?

And we'll talk about a second, but it's time for a break. And we're back. So I guess set the stage, when and how did astronomers, it starts to dawn on them,

there was an entirely new class of objects out there in the universe.

And we need to also come up with an acronym or a better name for this, but maybe we'll do that later.

All right. So back in 2018, folks looking through Atlas and Hong Kong Observatory Data

followed up on a transient from the Zwicki Transient Facility.

So it was found in this other data set.

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