But astronomers have now detected one that has such tremendous power it has produced one of the brightest displays ever seen — the equivalent of a scarcely believable one trillion suns.

The remote object, dubbed ‘Scary Barbie’ in a nod to its ‘absurd’ and ‘terrifying’ characteristics, has already burned incandescently for more than two years and shows no sign of sputtering out.

‘It’s absurd. 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,’ said Danny Milisavljevic, an ᴀssistant professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University’s College of Science.

‘This is the most energetic phenomenon I have ever encountered.’

Wow: Astronomers have spotted a supermᴀssive black hole dubbed ‘Scary Barbie’ (shown in an artist’s impressIon) which is tearing apart a giant star in one of the brightest displays ever seen

Scary Barbie is what is known as a transient — something that either appears and then disappears or changes in some dramatic way over the course of hours or days rather than centuries or millennia.

Typically they are extreme, short-lived events ᴀssociated with the total or partial destruction of an astrophysical object.

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

‘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 mᴀssive of black holes ripping apart a mᴀssive star.

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

One of the most powerful cosmic explosions ever witnessed, Scary Barbie was spotted when astronomers stumbled across a brightly burning patch of sky in an enormous data set gathered by computer-guided telescopes.

Because this light came from a remote region of the sky – travelling around 7.7 billion years across the universe – astronomers didn’t spot the event directly.

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

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

‘REFITT does big data analysis,’ Milisavljevic said.

‘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,’ said Danny Milisavljevic (pictured), an ᴀssistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University

‘It 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’t even know to look for. It doesn’t even have a template.

‘This is so different from anything else we’ve ever seen that we hadn’t even gotten around to trying to classify it. It’s been hanging out in the public data for years.’

When it was discovered the object was ᴀssigned the random name ZTF20abrbeie.

This led astronomers to affectionately call it Scary Barbie — Barbie for its alphanumeric designation and ‘scary’ because, as Milisavljevic says, ‘it is so much of an outlier; its characteristics are terrifying!’

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

Most transients last weeks or months, but this one has been going for more than 800 days and could continue to be visible for years to come.

The actual spaghettification of the mᴀssive 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.

This potentially makes it seem like it is lasting nearly twice as long as it actually is.

‘There are few things in the universe that can be so powerful, reactions that can be this long-lived,’ Milisavljevic said.

‘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.’