> If the neutron star or black hole at the centre of the LFBOT had powerful jets of energy firing from its poles, it could explain the flaring.
Sounds like a pulsar. But if that's the explanation of the flaring, you'd expect the flares to occur on a very accurate timescale. TFA doesn't say what the interval between flaring events is, or how regular it is.
It doesn't, really. And it's almost certainly not one. Practically all known pulsars are in our galaxy, and the known extragalactic one is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a sattelite of the Milky Way; observations of this LFBOT support a source in a more distant galaxy. The "B" and "O" in LFBOT are for "blue optical", indicating where in the elecgromagnetic spectrum its luminosity is concentrated. Pulsars are radio variables; "radio" is what the "r" in "pulsar" is for. Some pulsars (Vela, Crab) are surrounded by material that can obscure radio emissions and promote higher frequencies -- Vela & Crab are among the brightest X-Ray sources in our sky, and are quite bright optically too, including in blue. However, the higher-frequency optical and X-ray pulses track a small multiple (~2) of the radio pulses in these objects, i.e. the blue is brightest about several times a second.
By comparison the LFBOT optical flares rise and fall in blue brightness over the course of tens of minutes. Additionally, the difference between the optically brightest and dimmest parts of the LFBOT's cycle is more than ten times that of the two example bright optical pulsars above.
Other objects that flare over the course of tens of minutes tend to do so in soft gamma rays (rather than optically), or with much smaller differences between the brightest and darkest parts of the cycle.
Finally, pulsars once discovered stick around for many years with a fairly stable brightness (in radio, anyway, but see the Crab's "nanoshots" below). This LFBOT (like several others) faded far from peak luminosity over the course of about three months. That's several times quicker than the fade of a supernova, for example.
"To our knowledge, this phenomenon — minute-timescale optical flares at supernova-like luminosities, with order-of-magnitude amplitude variations, persisting for 100 days — has no precedent in the literature"
The reader is then directed to Supplementary Information Table 1: Summary of large-amplitude (>~ 10x) flares from representative literature objects. In the Neutron Stars part of that table there are three representative objects, two extragalactic soft gamma ray repeaters, and the Crab (but focusing on the highest-amplitude flares, which are called "nanoshots" because the flares only last a few nanoseconds on average). The Crab's nanoshots are in radio (frustratingly in a band popular with satellite communications), not optical.
Nobody really knows what LFBOTs are, but they keep popping up in optical-transient observations and so are likely a class of similar objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_blue_optical_transient which highlights the thinking that they are one possible outcome of a high-mass star's death (e.g. a star so heavy that it collapses directly into a black hole rather than going supernova and leaving behind a somewhat smaller black hole).
“Mysterious Nature article about the/a ‘Tasmanian devil’ space explosion baffles readers by failing to explain why it/they is/are called ‘Tasmanian devil/s’”
Hypothesis 1: So named because of rapid spin combined with erratic very-high-energy bursts reminiscent of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character.
However, “devil” isn’t capitalized, so…
Hypothesis 2: Astronomers who study these so-called LFBOTs have been naming them after animals — cow, koala, finch, camel. Next one? Tasmanian devil. Why not?
Ah. So, astronomers discovered these amazing extreme objects in deep space, named them a dry string of alphanumeric, and then, starstruck by the last few random (are they random?) letters, gazed in awe and wonder at those and saw… words. Pfffft.
"LFBOTs are seen across the Universe and defy explanation. The first, dubbed the Cow after its designation AT2018cow, was spotted in 2018 in a galaxy about 60 million parsecs (200 million light years) from Earth. The Cow was notable for being up to 100 times brighter than a supernova before dimming over just a few days, a process that takes weeks for a supernova."
Meh I think any race that had to compete for survival and has the imagination to build a death star has probably self destructed or will before being able to build it. The fermi paradox isn't a paradox at all, we ate just doomed, we've been here for hundreds of thousands of years, only in the past 100 we've been sending rockets to space, and we already have the capacity to self destruct entirely and probably will soon enough. So maybe the cosmic joke is that to grow you have to compete but competing also kills you, and maybe it's a certain fate for all species that grow enough to imagine themselves conquering the stars, or maybe I'm just that pessimistic.
Sounds like a pulsar. But if that's the explanation of the flaring, you'd expect the flares to occur on a very accurate timescale. TFA doesn't say what the interval between flaring events is, or how regular it is.