"Scary Barbie": How a black hole engulfs a star, causing one of the most powerful explosions in space

Astronomers have made an extraordinary discovery in the universe, detecting one of the longest, brightest, and most energetic cosmic objects ever observed. Dubbed "Scary Barbie," the remote object is an incredibly bright flash of light that has lasted for more than two years. The discovery was made by scientists analyzing data gathered by computer-guided telescopes, revealing that Scary Barbie was born from the final death throes of a star being torn to shreds by a supermassive black hole.

According to the findings, Scary Barbie is one of the most powerful cosmic explosions ever witnessed, and its power is part of the reason for the nickname, Space.com reports.

Co-author Danny Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University, described the object as the most energetic phenomenon he had ever encountered. "It's absurd. If you take a typical supernova and multiply it a thousand times, we're still not at how bright this is — and supernovas are among the most luminous objects in the sky," he said.

Black holes are known to feed upon unfortunate stars that cross their paths, using tidal forces exerted by their immense gravitational pulls. As the star is pulled closer to the black hole's maw, the gravity affecting the regions of the star closer to the black hole is far stronger than that acting on the star's farside. This disparity "spaghettifies" the star into a long, noodle-like string that gets tightly wound around the black hole layer by layer — like spaghetti around a fork.

This noodle of hot plasma then quickly accelerates around the black hole and spins out into an enormous jet of energy and matter, which produces a distinctive bright beam of light — known as a transient event — that optical, X-ray, and radio-wave telescopes can detect. Scary Barbie's light came from a remote region of the sky, traveling around 7.7 billion years across the expanding fabric of space-time.

The scientists used a machine-learning system called Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking to comb through data from many observations before finding the extremely bright light source. By using the Lick Observatory in California and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers were better able to characterize the light as coming from a transient event.

Scary Barbie is much brighter than any other transient event the astronomers could compare it to, and while transient events usually last only weeks or months, Scary Barbie has already burned incandescently for more than two years, with no indication it will sputter out. The nickname "Scary Barbie" was made by appending its randomly assigned alphanumeric name, ZTF20abrbeie, with a reference to its frightening power.

The discovery of Scary Barbie is weird even among other rare and extreme astronomical events. Further observations of the object, possibly using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, could enable scientists to snap some high-resolution images of the incredibly rare cosmic outburst.

Milisavljevic said, "There are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can be this long-lived. Discoveries like this really open our eyes to the fact that we are still uncovering mysteries and exploring wonders in the universe — things no one has ever seen before."

The researchers reported their findings on the preprint server arXiv, and their paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The discovery of Scary Barbie has provided an extraordinary opportunity to study one of the universe's most powerful and long-lived events. It is a testament to the incredible power of science and the human desire to explore and understand the universe we live in.