The seven hour explosion nobody could explain

[highplainsdem]

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-hour-explosion.html

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before you've had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

GRB 250702B, detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded and it dwarfs all others in duration. Of the roughly 15,000 bursts cataloged since the phenomenon was first recognized in 1973, only a handful even approach its duration. Normal gamma-ray bursts don't repeat. They arise from cataclysmic, one-time events, maybe a pair of neutron stars colliding, or a massive star collapsing in on itself. GRB 250702B did neither. "This is certainly an outburst unlike any other we've seen in the past 50 years," said one member of the detection team. The hunt for an explanation has occupied astronomers ever since.

A new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society focuses on one of the most intriguing possibilities, an intermediate mass black hole. Black holes come in dramatically different sizes. At one end, you have stellar mass black holes, a few times heavier than the sun, formed when massive stars die. At the other, you have the supermassive monsters lurking at the centers of galaxies, millions or billions of solar masses across. In between sits a largely missing population, intermediate mass black holes, ranging from a few hundred to a hundred thousand solar masses. Theory says they should be common. Finding them has proven stubbornly difficult.

The researchers propose that GRB 250702B was produced when an ordinary star like our sun wandered too close to one of these intermediate mass black holes and was torn apart by its tidal forces. As the shredded stellar material spiraled inward and was consumed, it powered a relativistic jet of particles firing outward at close to the speed of light, generating the extraordinary gamma-ray emission Fermi detected.

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[Permanut]

1. Good thing it's several billion light years away.