In 2025, astronomers detected a strange signal of data – a ‘blast’ from space that lasted for a total of seven hours. Now, a science team believe they’ve worked out what it was. It could have been an unusually long example of an intense source of energy known as a gamma-ray bust. Gamma-ray bursts are bursts of high-energy radiation that scientists detect using instruments on Earth in the form of gamma rays. The mystery of these strange signals from deep space goes all the way back to the 1960s, when US military satellites first detected them……..Continue reading….
By: Iain Todd
Source: Night Magazine
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Critics:
Detected about once a day on average, gamma-ray bursts can appear anywhere in the sky with no warning. They are very distant events, with the closest-known example erupting more than 100 million light-years away. The record-setting duration of the July burst – named GRB 250702B – places it in a class by itself. Researchers have been eagerly discussing their findings. They agree the unprecedented event likely heralds a new kind of stellar explosion.
And they said the best explanation for the outburst is that a black hole consumed a star. But they disagree on exactly how it happened. Exciting possibilities include a black hole weighing a few thousand times the sun’s mass shredding a star that passed too close to it or a much smaller black hole merging with and consuming its stellar companion.
Of the roughly 15,000 gamma-ray bursts observed since astronomers first discovered the phenomenon in 1973, none are as long, and only a half dozen even come close. Because opportunities to study such events are so rare, and because they may reveal new ways to create gamma-ray bursts, astronomers are particularly excited about the July burst.
Most bursts last from a few milliseconds to a few minutes. Also, they’re known to form in two ways: either by a merger of two city-sized neutron stars or the collapse of a massive star once its core runs out of fuel. Each produces a new black hole. Some of the matter falling toward the black hole becomes channeled into tight jets of particles that stream out at almost the speed of light, creating gamma rays as they go.
But neither of these types of bursts can readily create jets able to fire for days, which is why 250702B poses a unique puzzle. The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered the burst. It triggered the instrument multiple times over the course of three hours. Also detecting the burst was:
The Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the Russian Konus instrument on NASA’s Wind mission, the Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer on Psyche – a NASA spacecraft currently en route to asteroid 16 Psyche – and Japan’s Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image instrument on the International Space Station.
Eric Burns is an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and a member of Neights’ team studying the burst’s gamma-ray glow. The Wide-field X-ray Telescope on China’s Einstein Probe also detected the burst in X-rays. And it showed that a signal was present the previous day. The first precise location came early July 3 when Swift’s X-Ray Telescope imaged the burst in the constellation Scutum, near the crowded, dusty plane of our Milky Way galaxy.
Given this location and the day-earlier X-ray detection, astronomers wondered if this event might be a different type of outburst from somewhere within our own galaxy.
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