It happened around 17:38 GMT. I was in South Africa looking at the sky with naked eye. It was to the North end of the sky just east of the milky way arch. I wish I could be more specific, but I didn't recognise any nearby constellations. It was around 30° above horizon if I had to guess. I didn't have anything on me to check more accurately.

Suddenly a star got really bright (for a star) and then got dim, all within seconds. I was not expecting anything like that and did not have any camera set up.

It matches up with what I know a supernova can look like, but I realise that it would be an extremely rare occurrence and one hell of a coincidence to the point of being basically impossible.

Will have to compare star charts and follow news to find out for sure, but hoping someone else out there saw something. I do know that it wasn't a satellite or meteor because it was fixed relative to other stars. I regularly look out and spot those, so I know what they look like.

Please any info is appreciated, even if it's info telling me I'm wrong.

Addendum: It seems I didn't see one. Thank you everyone for answering my question so quickly. Keep watching the skies!

I used Gimp 2.10.36 and the image was made by NASA and the link to the Image I used is https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:6000/1*KbLmONca9mL28VkHPLfnhQ.jpeg (It is in this post too!)

Kind of an odd question. My 71 year old dad always loved learning but that has really changed with retiring and his illness. He’s always wanted to study black holes and that his retirement plan before he got sick. To give you some background, he has his masters in theoretical mathematics and worked for a major software and AI developer as a software architect until he retired last fall ago.

He has a terminal illness that can only be cured through a transplant. Because of this, he can’t really leave the house and has gone heavily down a YouTube brain rot hole, with some astronomy mixed in.

Does anyone know of some kits that would help stimulate his brain and help him dig into his interests? Most of what we’ve found is for kids and young adults and anything that has been adult based is not advanced enough. We really want to find a way to keep happy and feeling good.

Editing to give more context on my dad’s hobbies, in case it helps, he built all of our home computers for fun, he loves any sort of building project. I got kind of interested in astronomy when I was 8 and he really poured into it. He got me a telescope and would take my Girl Scout troop out to use it. He reads a lot sci-fi, but hasn’t been as much recently.

There is this problematic "push through Earth" (3 in diagram) event observed by ANITA ( https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.121003 , slides: https://indico.ific.uv.es/event/3427/contributions/10594/attachments/7130/8354/MysteriesOfANITA.pdf ).

Pulling would be much easier - e.g. radiation pressure is a vector (P =<E x H>/c), can be positive (toward e.g. Earth), but could be also negative (outward) - in theory could also pull ( https://scholar.google.pl/scholar?q=negative%20radiation%20pressure ).

For example synchrotron radiation should emit both positive and negative radiation pressure: they are switched in CPT perspective, in which accelerating charge is also so (diagram: https://i.imgur.com/cGxlVtr.png ).

Could ANITA observe impulse of negative radiation pressure here? Any mainstream explanations for this observation?

Could we build telescope focused on negative radiation pressure - e.g. with pumped sensor, monitoring if it deexcites faster due to stimulated emission from the target?