A Blast from the Pasture: Studying the environment of AT 2018cow with MUSE

Understand

AT 2018cow was the nearest and best studied example of a new breed of extra-galactic, luminous and rapidly-evolving transient.

• Both the progenitor systems and explosion mechanisms of these rapid transients remain a mystery - the energetics, spectral signatures, and timescales make them challenging to interpret in established classes of supernovae and tidal disruption events.
• The rich, multi-wavelength data-set of AT 2018cow has still left several interpretations viable to explain the nature of this event.
• In this paper we analyse integral-field spectroscopic data of the host galaxy, CGCG 137-068, to compare environmental constraints with leading progenitor models.