Supermassive black hole dubbed ‘Scary Barbie’ is tearing apart a giant star

By William On Apr 28, 2023

It is known that supermassive black holes are huge objects that gobble up stars and spew out the cosmic remnants into the universe.

But astronomers have now discovered one that has such tremendous power that it has produced one of the brightest displays ever.

Dubbed “Scary Barbie,” a nod to its “absurd” and “terrifying” features, the remote object has been burning glowingly for more than two years and shows no signs of spitting out.

‘It’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 most luminous objects in the sky,” said Danny Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue. University College of Science.

“This is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered.”

Wow: Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole dubbed ‘Scary Barbie’ (pictured in an artist’s impression) ripping apart a giant star in one of the brightest displays ever seen

Scary Barbie is what’s known as a transient – something that appears and then disappears or changes dramatically over the course of hours or days rather than centuries or millennia.

WHAT IS A ‘TIDE DISTURBANCE’?

When a star gets too close to a black hole, it undergoes “spaghettification” – stretching vertically and compressing horizontally by the strong gravitational field.

These are known as tidal disturbance events, or TDEs, and emit light, radio, and other waves for a few weeks or months as they occur.

This is because the elongated material eventually spins around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can detect millions of light years away.

Usually they are extreme, short-lived events related to the total or partial destruction of an astrophysical object.

“We think a very supermassive black hole pulled a star in and ripped it apart,” said fellow researcher Bhagya Subrayan, a graduate student at Purdue.

The forces around a black hole, called tidal disturbance, pull other objects apart in a process called ‘spaghettification’.

“We think that happened, but on extreme time scales: the most massive black holes tear apart a massive star.

“The duration is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and it produced the most luminous transient in the universe.”

Scary Barbie, one of the most powerful cosmic explosions ever seen, was spotted when astronomers encountered a brightly burning patch of sky in a massive data set collected by computer-controlled telescopes.

Because this light came from a remote part of the sky — traveling through the universe about 7.7 billion years — astronomers didn’t see the event directly.

Instead, by developing a machine-learning system called Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking (REFITT), the researchers sifted through the data of many observations before finding them.

They then used the Lick Observatory in California and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to determine that the bright light came from a transient event.

“REFITT does big data analysis,” said Milisavljevic.

“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 most luminous objects in the sky,” said Danny Milisavljevic (pictured), an assistant professor of physics and astronomy. at Purdue University

“It sifts through millions of alerts and finds out what interesting things we might want to take a closer look at.

‘This is a good example. Computers are really good at finding things if we can tell them exactly what to look for.

‘But these kinds of things, deviant objects, the computer often doesn’t even know how to look for. It doesn’t even have a template.

“This is so unlike anything else we’ve ever seen that we didn’t even get around to classifying it. It’s been hanging around in the public records for years.”

Upon discovery, the object was arbitrarily named ZTF20abbeie.

This led astronomers to affectionately call it Scary Barbie—Barbie because of its alphanumeric designation and “scary” because, as Milisavljevic says, “it’s such an outlier; his features are terrifying!’

Not only is the transient black hole much brighter, much brighter and more energetic than any scientists have ever captured before, it also lasts much longer than usual.

Most transients last weeks or months, but this one has lasted for more than 800 days and can be visible for years to come.

The actual spaghettification of the massive star may be of much shorter duration, but because the transient is so far away, the law of relativity slows down the light as it travels to the human eye.

This makes it look like it will last almost twice as long as it actually is.

“There are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can last so long,” Milisavljevic said.

“Discoveries like this really open our eyes to the fact that we are still uncovering mysteries and wonders in the universe — things that no one has ever seen before.”

The research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

WHAT’S IN A BLACK HOLE?

Black holes are strange objects in the universe that get their name from the fact that nothing can escape their gravity, not even light.

If you venture too close and cross the so-called event horizon, the point from which no light can escape, you will also be trapped or destroyed.

For small black holes you would never survive such an approach anyway.

The tidal forces close to the event horizon are enough to stretch any matter into just a string of atoms, in a process physicists call “spaghettification.”

But for large black holes, such as the supermassive objects at the cores of galaxies like the Milky Way, which weigh tens of millions if not billions of times the mass of a star, crossing the event horizon would be straightforward.

Because it should be possible to survive the transition from our world to the world of the black hole, physicists and mathematicians have long wondered what that world would look like.

They’ve turned to Einstein’s general equations of relativity to predict the world inside a black hole.

These equations work well until an observer reaches the center or singularity, where in theoretical calculations the curvature of space-time becomes infinite.