Longest gamma ray burst ever: Astronomers have observed a cosmic explosion unlike anything seen before, a gamma ray burst, that didn’t just happen once, but even repeated several times over the course of a single day, as per a report.

Understanding Gamma Ray Bursts: Cosmic Explosions Explained

Gamma ray bursts, also known as GRBs, are among the most powerful explosions in the universe as they release in seconds as much energy as the Sun produces over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime, as per a Futurism report. These bursts usually signal the death of a massive star. It happens when the star burns through all its fuel and it near-instantly collapses under its own gravity in a supernova, which blows the stars to smithereens and blasts its scattered remains into space, as reported by Futurism.

GRB 250702B: A Gamma-Ray Burst That Defies Scientific Expectations

But this new event, called GRB 250702B, challenges that understanding. NASA’s Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope on July 2, detected three distinctive bursts, but even more surprisingly, the Einstein Probe, an X-ray telescope, had picked up similar activity nearly a full day earlier, as per the report.

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Unusually Long and Periodic Gamma-Ray Burst Captivates Scientists

Radboud University astronomer Andrew Levan said, "This is 100-1000 times longer than most GRBs," as quoted in the report.

Antonio Martin-Carrillo, an astronomer at University College Dublin and coauthor of a new study published in 'The Astrophysical Journal Letters', said that the bursts also appeared to be periodic, meaning they followed a repeated pattern, something never seen before in GRBs, as per the Futurism report.

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Breakthrough Discovery: Gamma-Ray Burst Originates Outside the Milky Way

Initially, astronomers thought the bursts might be coming from inside our own Milky Way, since the source was near the plane of the galaxy, as per the report. But follow-up observations with the HAWK-I infrared camera on the Very Large Telescope in Chile revealed that the bursts originated far beyond our galaxy, likely billions of light-years away, as per the Futurism report.

Martin-Carrillo said that, "What we found was considerably more exciting: the fact that this object is extragalactic means that it is considerably more powerful," as quoted in the report.

While stars have been observed to explode multiple times in certain binary systems, where a white dwarf siphons material from a companion star, only one of those explosions is a true supernova, and none have produced repeated GRBs like this one, as per Futurism.

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This Cosmic Event Shakes 50 Years of Gamma-Ray Burst Research

Martin-Carrillo highlighted that, "This event is unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations," adding, "GRBs are catastrophic events, so they are expected to go off just once because the source that produced them does not survive the dramatic explosion," as quoted in the report.

Exploring Possible Causes of the Repeating Gamma-Ray Burst

Scientists are now considering two main ideas. One is that a massive star collapsed in an unusual way, with material continuing to power the explosion for far longer than usual. But that would normally only last a few seconds, according to Futurism.

The other idea is a tidal disruption event, where a star is torn apart by a black hole, as per the Futurism report. But explaining this particular burst would require both an unusual star and a rare kind of black hole, an intermediate-mass black hole, which has never been directly observed before, as reported by Futurism.


Martin-Carrillo pointed out that either explanation would be a first, saying, "We are still not sure what produced this or if we can ever really find out," adding, "but, with this research, we have made a huge step forward towards understanding this extremely unusual and exciting object," as quoted in the report.

FAQs

What is a gamma-ray burst?
It’s an incredibly powerful explosion in space that releases more energy in seconds than our Sun will in its entire life, as per the Futurism report.

Why is this repeating gamma-ray burst so unusual?
Because gamma-ray bursts usually happen once when a star dies. This one repeated multiple times in just one day, which has never been seen before.