{"id":5509,"date":"2023-04-25T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-25T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/?p=5509"},"modified":"2025-07-30T13:44:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T17:44:30","slug":"uncovering-a-stars-demise-supermassive-black-hole-tears-apart-a-giant-star-in-a-display-brighter-more-energetic-and-longer-lasting-than-any-observed-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/2023\/Q2\/uncovering-a-stars-demise-supermassive-black-hole-tears-apart-a-giant-star-in-a-display-brighter-more-energetic-and-longer-lasting-than-any-observed-before","title":{"rendered":"Uncovering a star\u2019s demise: Supermassive black hole tears apart a giant star in a display brighter, more energetic and longer lasting than any observed before"},"content":{"rendered":"

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. —<\/p> \n

A distant star, dying a fiery and dramatic death, torn apart by a supermassive black hole in a forgotten corner of the sky. One of the most luminous, energetic, long-lasting transient objects didn\u2019t blaze through the night sky inspiring legends and launching civilizations. Instead, astronomers, acting as celestial supersleuths, uncovered evidence of the star\u2019s death throes where it had hidden undetected for years in a mass of computer-gathered telescope data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s absurd. If you take a typical supernova and multiply it a thousand times, we’re still not at how bright this is \u2013 and supernovas are among the most luminous objects in the sky,\u201d said Danny Milisavljevic<\/a>, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University\u2019s College of Science<\/a>. \u201cThis is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In astronomy, things that are the most luminous are often the most energetic. Milisavljevic, an expert on stellar life cycles \u2013 especially star death \u2013 noted that the data points to an extremely anomalous observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The object, like all those observed, was assigned a random name when it was discovered. Its name is ZTF20abrbeie, or, as astronomers affectionately call it, \u201cScary Barbie.\u201d Barbie for its alphanumeric designation and \u201cscary\u201d because, Milisavljevic said, \u201cIt\u2019s so much of an outlier; its characteristics are terrifying!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Danny Milisavljevic, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University\u2019s College of Science, is leading a research team using the world\u2019s most powerful telescope, launching later this month. (Purdue University photo\/Rebecca McElhoe)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The object is what is known as a transient \u2013 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. In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a>, Milisavljevic, his graduate student Bhagya Subrayan<\/a>, 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. Subrayan\u2019s research focuses on big data analysis of sky survey data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe think a very supermassive black hole pulled in a star and ripped it apart,\u201d Subrayan said. \u201cThe forces around a black hole, called tidal disruption, pull other objects apart in a process called \u2018spaghettification.\u2019 We think that\u2019s what happened, but on extreme time scales: The most massive of black holes ripping apart a massive star. The duration is unlike anything we\u2019ve ever seen before, and it produced the most luminous transient in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It hid in plain sight. While it\u2019s bright, it is also extremely far away and in a somewhat neglected corner of the sky. The anomaly was discovered using Milisavljevic\u2019s lab\u2019s AI engine. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cREFITT does big data analysis,\u201d Milisavljevic said. \u201cIt combs through millions of alerts and figures out what interesting things we might want to look at closer. This is a great example. Computers are really good at finding things when we can tell them precisely what to look for. But things like this, anomalous objects, the computer often doesn\u2019t even know to look for. It doesn\u2019t even have a template. This is so different from anything else we\u2019ve ever seen that we hadn\u2019t even gotten around to trying to classify it. It’s been hanging out in the public data for years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Spectrographic analysis from those telescopes helped the team put a name to the odd phenomenon the data reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. Most transients last weeks or months, but this one has lasted for more than 800 days \u2013 over two years \u2013 and latest available data show that it may be visible for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual event itself \u2013 the spaghettification of this massive star \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can be this long-lived,\u201d Milisavljevic said. \u201cDiscoveries like this really open our eyes to the fact that we are still uncovering mysteries and exploring wonders in the universe \u2013 things no one has ever seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n

\n Writer\/Media contact:<\/strong>\u00a0Brittany Steff,\u00a0bsteff@purdue.edu<\/a>
Source:<\/strong>\u00a0Danny Milisavljevic,\u00a0DMilisav@purdue.edu<\/a> <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A distant star, dying a fiery and dramatic death, torn apart by a supermassive black hole in a forgotten corner of the sky. One of the most luminous, energetic, long-lasting transient objects didn\u2019t blaze through the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,7,524],"tags":[],"department":[32],"source":[29],"purdue_today_topic":[66],"coauthors":[77],"class_list":["post-5509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-research-excellence","category-space","department-science","source-purdue-news","purdue_today_topic-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5514,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions\/5514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"purdue_today_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/purdue_today_topic?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}