![]() If you're looking for "lighter" gaming-related entertainment, try /r/gaming! Please look over our rules and FAQ before posting. This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation./r/Games is for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. “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.” “There are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can be this long-lived,” Milisavljevic says. The actual event itself-the spaghettification of this 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 human eyes, making it seem to last nearly twice as long. Most transients last weeks or months, but this one has lasted for more than 800 days-over two years-and latest available data show that it may be visible for years to come. Scary Barbie is not just orders of magnitude brighter and more energetic than any transient scientists have recorded before, but it is also lasting much longer than usual transients do. Spectrographic analysis from those telescopes helped the team put a name to the odd phenomenon the data reported. Once the team and REFITT had identified Scary Barbie as an intriguing opportunity for research, they used data from other telescopes, including the Lick Observatory in California and the W.M. ![]() It’s been hanging out in the public data for years.” This is so different from anything else we’ve ever seen that we hadn’t even gotten around to trying to classify it. But things like this, anomalous objects, the computer often doesn’t even know to look for. Computers are really good at finding things when we can tell them precisely what to look for. “It combs through millions of alerts and figures out what interesting things we might want to look at closer. “REFITT does big data analysis,” Milisavljevic says. The Recommender Engine For Intelligent Transient Tracking (REFITT) combs through observations from a number of telescopes around the world, including those made by the Zwicky Transient Facility using the Palomar Observatory in California. The anomaly was discovered using Milisavljevic’s lab’s AI engine. While it’s bright, it is also extremely far away and in a somewhat neglected corner of the sky. If Scary Barbie is so bright and so notable, how did it just now come to light, even though datasets indicate the first observations occurred in 2020? The duration is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and it produced the most luminous transient in the universe.” Hiding in plain sight “The forces around a black hole, called tidal disruption, pull other objects apart in a process called ‘spaghettification.’ We think that’s what happened, but on extreme time scales: The most massive of black holes ripping apart a massive star. ![]() “We think a very supermassive black hole pulled in a star and ripped it apart,” Subrayan says. Subrayan’s research focuses on big data analysis of sky survey data. In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Milisavljevic, his graduate student Bhagya Subrayan, and their team analyzed the data to conclude that the bright, long-lived transient is a black hole in the process of consuming a star. The object is what is known as a transient-something observed in the sky that either appears and then disappears or changes in some dramatic way over the course of hours or days rather than centuries or millennia. Its name is ZTF20abrbeie, or, as astronomers affectionately call it, “Scary Barbie.” Barbie for its alphanumeric designation and “scary” because, Milisavljevic says, “It’s so much of an outlier its characteristics are terrifying!” The object, like all those observed, was assigned a random name when it was discovered. Milisavljevic, an expert on stellar life cycles-especially star death-notes that the data points to an extremely anomalous observation. In astronomy, things that are the most luminous are often the most energetic. “This is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered.” Why ‘Scary Barbie’? 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,” says Danny Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University’s College of Science. Astronomers have discovered one of the most luminous, energetic, long-lasting transient objects hidden undetected for years in a mass of computer-gathered telescope data. ![]()
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