Astronomers from the University of Sheffield have recorded an extremely rare type of star explosion in space - an aspherical one. The results of the study of the flattest star explosion are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The discovery was made by chance: at first, scientists noticed a flash of polarized light. With the help of the Liverpool Telescope, the degree of polarization was measured. This made it possible to reveal the shape of the explosion, which turned out to be comparable in size to the solar system. The resulting data was then used to recreate a 3D model of the explosion.

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The observed object was immediately assigned to a fast blue optical transient (FBOT) - an event similar to supernovae and gamma-ray bursts in terms of high optical brightness, but the increase and decay in this case are faster.

Further study showed that the explosion, located in a galaxy at a distance of 180 million years from Earth, has an unprecedented asphericity, that is, the flattest shape ever discovered. This is a very rare phenomenon, since usually the explosions of stars in the Universe are accompanied by a spherical shape, because the luminaries themselves are spherical.

The authors suggest that there may be several explanations for this: the explosion of the star formed a disk just before it died; or it is an unformed supernova, in which the core turns into a black hole or a neutron star as a result of collapse, and then absorbs the rest of the star.