Astronomers have discovered one of the longest, brightest and most energetic cosmic objects ever observed, and they’ve dubbed it the “Scary Barbie,” in part because of its terrifying power.
The distant object, an amazingly bright flash of light that lasted more than two years, was discovered in a huge dataset collected by computer-controlled telescopes.
After finding a brightly burning patch of sky in the data and comparing it to observations made by other telescopes, astronomers realized they had stumbled upon one of the most powerful cosmic explosions ever witnessed. They reported their findings April 17 in the preprint server with Xiv (opens in a new tab)and their work has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Related: The black hole “formed” the donut-shaped star, and astronomers captured the bloody encounter
“It’s absurd. If you take a typical supernova and multiply it a thousand times, we still don’t understand how bright it is — and supernovae are among the brightest objects in the sky,” co-author Danny Milisavlevich (opens in a new tab)Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University, the statement said (opens in a new tab). “This is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered.”
Scary Barbie was born from the final death throes when a star was torn apart by a supermassive black hole.
Black holes feeding on the unfortunate stars that cross their paths using the tidal forces created by their immense gravitational pull. As the star moves closer and closer to the tip of the black hole, the gravity affecting the regions of the star closer to the black hole is much stronger than that acting on the far side of the star. These differences “spaghetti” the star into a long, noodle-like string that is tightly wound layer by layer around the black hole—like spaghetti around a fork.
This noodle of hot plasma then rapidly accelerates the black hole and spins out into a huge jet of energy and matter, producing a characteristic bright beam of light known as a transient event, which optically, X-ray and radio wave telescopes can detect.
Because the light from the scary barbie came from a distant region of the sky, traveling about 7.7 billion years through the fabric of expanding 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 through data from many observations before finding an 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 as a transient event.
But Scary Barbie — a nickname coined by adding its randomly assigned alphanumeric name ZTF20abrbeie in reference to its frightening power — is odd even among other rare and extreme astronomical events. It’s much brighter than any other transient that astronomers could compare it to, and while transients typically last only weeks or months, the scary Barbie has already been burning in the incandescent light for more than two years, and there’s no sign of it going out.
Astronomers said further observations of the scary Barbie have been made, possibly using the Hubble Space Telescope and The James Webb Space Telescopecould allow them to capture some high-resolution images of the incredibly rare cosmic flare.
“There are few things in the universe that can be so strong, reactions that can be so long-lasting,” Milisavljevic said. “Discoveries like this really open our eyes to the fact that we are still uncovering mysteries and exploring wonders in the universe – things that no one has seen before.”
#Meet #Scary #Barbie #absurd #cosmic #explosion #times #brighter #supernova
