"The Cow": A Bafflingly Flat Space Explosion Defies Explanation

An explosion in a galaxy 180 million light-years away, named AT2018cow, has challenged our understanding of how stars die, appearing to represent the flattest explosion of its kind on record. The explosion belonged to an extremely rare class of cosmic blasts known as fast blue optical transients (FBOTs) and seems to have only exploded out sideways, resulting in an eruption shaped like a disk. The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.