Optical Flares in the Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient AT2022tsd ("Tasmanian Devil")
Rachid Ouyed (Department of Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

TL;DR
This paper proposes a model where luminous fast blue optical transients are powered by a delayed neutron star to hybrid star conversion, involving quark phase transition and ejecta fragmentation, explaining observed features of several transients.
Contribution
It introduces a novel QCD magnetar model for LFBOTs, linking neutron star conversion, ejecta fragmentation, and multi-wavelength emissions in a unified framework.
Findings
Reproduces key features of observed LFBOTs including AT2022tsd and others.
Predicts kilonova-like emission in environments without neutron star mergers.
Explains optical flares as resulting from ejecta fragmentation and clump transparency.
Abstract
We propose that luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) signal the delayed conversion of a massive neutron star (NS; M_NS > ~1.8 Msun) into a highly magnetized hybrid star (HS) with B_HS ~10^15 G surface field; a QCD magnetar. This is the partial conversion channel in the Quark-Nona (QN) model where the core of the NS enters a quark phase with spontaneous generation of extreme (i.e., up to > 10^18 G) magnetic field independent of the NS spin. The process ejects ~0.01 Msun of the NS outermost layers at ~0.1c (the QN ejecta) with a photon diffusion timescale of a few days. The powering of the QN ejecta by spin-down of a rapidly rotating HS (inherited from the parent NS) yields the LFBOT. The fragmentation of the QN ejecta allows optical flares to arise from clumps that become optically thin, releasing stored radiation energy (with luminosities comparable to the LFBOT peak) on…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
