Fast Blue Optical Transients (FBOTs) are a recently-discovered class of incredibly bright cosmic events in blue and ultraviolet light, rising to enormous luminosities before fading away again within tens of days. For over a decade, astronomers have been working to determine what kind of event could possibly cause this extreme and rapidly-evolving emission. One possibility was some exotic kind of stellar explosion, with unusual properties that would make the explosion much brighter and faster than ordinary supernovae.

However, the event AT2024wpp threw a wrench in the works—it released over 100 times the energy that an ordinary supernova would, making a stellar explosion explanation very difficult to reconcile with the data. Observations by the X-ray missions Chandra, Swift, and NuSTAR revealed an evolving X-ray spectrum in the aftermath of the event which, in combination with evidence of powerful outflows at a significant fraction of the speed of light, indicates the presence of extreme accretion onto a black hole as it tears apart and consumes a massive star in a matter of days. 

Read more about this exciting event in this press release from UC Berkeley.