Scientists have found a “Scary Barbie” in space: this object was born “in agony”

A distant object that appears as a surprisingly bright flash of light was found in a huge data set.

collected by computer-controlled telescopes.By discovering a brightly glowing patch of sky and comparing it with observations made by other observatories, astronomers realized they had stumbled upon one of the most powerful cosmic explosions ever observed. They reported their findings on a preprint server arXiv, and their paper was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Scary Barbie” was born “in the final death throes of a star torn to shreds by a supermassive black hole,” scientists write.

As the "Scary Barbie" light camefrom a distant region of the sky, traveling for about 7.7 billion years through the expanding fabric of spacetime, astronomers did not directly observe the event. Instead, by developing a machine learning system called the Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking, astronomers tested these data sets 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 coming from a short-lived event.

“Scary Barbie” is a nickname thatoriginated from the addition of a random alphanumeric name, ZTF20abrbeie, with a reference to its frightening power. This phenomenon looks strange even among other rare and extreme astronomical phenomena. It is much brighter than any other short-lived event that astronomers could compare it to. And while transient events typically only last a few weeks or months, Scary Barbie has been burning for more than two years with no sign of it going out.

Astronomers said that further observationsbehind Scary Barbie, possibly using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, will produce some high-resolution images of the incredibly rare cosmic explosion.

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