Scientists have found in space "Scary Barbie": this object was born "in agony"

A distant object that looks like a surprisingly bright flash of light was found in a huge dataset

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

Since the light of "Scary Barbie" came fromdistant region of the sky, traveling about 7.7 billion years through the expanding fabric of space-time, astronomers did not directly observe this event. Instead, by developing the Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking machine learning system, astronomers tested these datasets 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 that originateddue to the addition of the random alphanumeric name ZTF20abrbeie in reference to her intimidating 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 transients typically only last a few weeks or months, Scary Barbie has been on fire for more than two years and there is no sign that it will go out.

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

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