Overview
- The Las Cumbres Observatory’s global network tracked SN 2024afav for over 200 days, capturing four clear brightness bumps and a possible fifth.
- Intervals between the bumps shortened in a consistent pattern by about 29% each time, producing a distinctive light-curve ‘chirp’.
- Modeling indicates a tilted magnetar with an asymmetric, slightly tilted accretion disk undergoing Lense–Thirring precession reproduces the timing and amplitudes.
- The wobbling disk can periodically obscure or reflect magnetar emission, and as the disk shrinks through accretion its precession speeds up, creating the chirp.
- The authors report the first observational evidence for Lense–Thirring effects at a magnetar and say the mechanism fits some past SLSNe-I, with Rubin Observatory data needed to test how common it is.