Astronomers have discovered one of the longest, brightest and most energetic cosmic objects ever observed – and they’ve dubbed it the “Scary Barbie” because of its terrifying power.
The remote object, an astonishingly bright flash of light that lasted more than two years, was discovered hidden within an enormous data set gathered by a computer-guided telescope.
After finding a bright burning patch of sky in the data and cross-referencing it with observations made by other telescopes, astronomers realized they had stumbled upon one of the most powerful cosmic explosions of all time. They reported their findings on April 17 on the preprint server arXiv (opens in new tab)And their paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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“That’s absurd. If you take a typical supernova and multiply it a thousand times, we still don’t know how bright it is — and supernovae are among the brightest objects in the sky,” co-author Danny Milisavljevic (opens in new tab)Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University, said in a statement (opens in new tab). “This is the most energetic event I have ever encountered.”
Scary Barbie was born from the final death of a star torn apart by a supermassive black hole.
Black holes feeding on unlucky stars that cross their path, exerting tidal forces through their immense gravitational pull. As the star approaches the black hole’s mouth, the gravitational pull affecting regions of the star closer to the black hole is stronger than that acting on the far side of the star. This disparity “spaghettifies” the star into a long, noodle-like string that is wound tightly through the layer around the black hole layer—like spaghetti around a fork.
This noodle of hot plasma then accelerates around the black hole and turns into an enormous jet of energy and matter, producing a distinctive bright beam of light – known as a transient – that is known as optical, X-ray and radio-wave Binoculars can detect.
Because the scary barbie’s light came from a distant region of the sky — traveling some 7.7 billion years in the expanding fabric of space-time — astronomers did not observe the event directly. Instead, developing a machine-learning system called the Recommender Engine for intelligent transient tracking, the researchers combed data from many observations before finding the extremely bright light source. Using the Lick Observatory in California and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers were able to better characterize the light coming from the transient event.
But Scary Barbie — a nickname created by combining its randomly assigned alphanumeric name, ZTF20abrbeie, with a reference to its terrifying power — is also strange among other rare and extreme astronomical phenomena. It’s much brighter than any other transient that astronomers can compare it to, and, while transients typically last only weeks or months, Scary Barbie has been burning for more than two years, with no sign that it’s coming out. .
Astronomers said further observations of Scary Barbie, possibly using the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescopemay enable them to take some high-resolution images of extremely rare cosmic outbursts.
“There are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can live for so long,” said Milisavaljevic. “Discoveries like this really open our eyes to the fact that we are still uncovering mysteries and discovering wonders in the universe—things that no one has seen before.”
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