The Kangaroo’s First Hop: The Early Fast Cooling Phase of EP250108a/SN 2025kg

Fast X-ray transients are a rare and poorly understood population of events. Previously difficult to detect in real time, the launch of the Einstein Probe with its Wide-field X-ray Telescope has led to a rapid expansionof the sample and allowed the exploration of these transients across the electromagnetic spectrum. EP250108a is a recently detected example linked to an optical counterpart, SN 2025kg, or “the kangaroo.” Together with a companion Letter we present our observing campaign and analysis of this event. In this letter, we focus on the early evolution of the optical counterpart over the first 6 days, including our measurement of the redshift of z = 0.17641. We compare to other supernovae and fast transients showing similar features, finding significant similarities with SN 2006aj and SN 2020bvc, and show that the source is well modelled by a rapidly expanding cooling blackbody. We show the observed X-ray and radio properties are consistent with a collapsar-powered jet that is low energy (≲1051 erg) and/or fails to break out of the dense material surrounding it. While we examine the possibility that the optical emission emerges from the shock produced as the supernova ejecta expand into a dense shell of circumstellar material, due to our X-ray and radio inferences, we favour a model where it arises from a shocked cocoon resulting from a trapped jet. This makes SN 2025 one of the few examples of this currently observationally rare event.