Black hole’s feeding frenzy triggers longest cosmic explosion on record
A gamma-ray burst likely caused by a black hole consuming a star has sparked a debate among astronomers, who say the event may represent an entirely new class of stellar explosion not seen in more than 50 years.
NASA says that a stellar-mass black hole tore a star apart which created an unusually long-lasting gamma ray burst that has been identified as “GRB 250702B.” AccuWeather’s Emilee Speck has the story.
Scientists may have to rethink their playbook for studying gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful known cosmic explosions, after a blast detected in July set a new record by firing energetic jets for days.
Astronomers around the world detected the gamma-ray burst, or GRB, on July 2. Unlike typical GRBs, which NASA says occur daily and usually last only milliseconds to a few minutes, this one persisted far longer.
“This is certainly an outburst unlike any other we’ve seen in the past 50 years,” said Eliza Neights with George Washington University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The leading theory among astronomers is that this gamma-ray burst was likely caused by a black hole consuming a star, but how it happened is still puzzling the scientific community.
This artist’s concept depicts GRB 250702B (left of center) erupting within its host galaxy. This powerful explosion, first detected on July 2, blasted out narrow jets of particles at nearly the speed of light and exhibited repeated outbursts that lasted over 7 hours. (Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick)
According to Neights, the initial blast of gamma rays lasted seven hours, and additional jets continued for a week. NASA notes that the only other GRBs with comparable durations have lasted roughly half a day for the entire event.
The burst, officially designated GRB 250702B, was fully recorded only because multiple spacecraft and ground-based observatories were already monitoring the sky when it occurred.
Follow-up observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope captured the host galaxy of this explosion, revealing a system heavily shrouded in dust.
On Oct. 5, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope gave astronomers their clearest view of GRB 250702B’s edge-on host galaxy, which is nestled within a richly populated star field in the densely packed central plane of our own Milky Way galaxy. In the zoomed inset, tick marks indicate the burst’s position near the top edge of the galaxy’s dark dust lane. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, H. Sears (Rutgers). Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI))
“The burst was remarkably powerful, erupting with the equivalent energy emitted by a thousand Suns shining for 10 billion years,” said Benjamin Gompertz with the University of Birmingham, U.K. “Amazingly, the galaxy is so far away that light from this explosion began racing outward about 8 billion years ago, long before our Sun and solar system had even begun to form.”
Because of its extraordinary length and energy, NASA says GRB 250702B cannot be explained by the usual origins of gamma-ray bursts — such as neutron-star mergers or the collapse of a massive star. Instead, astronomers say the event provides compelling evidence for a new class of stellar explosion, potentially involving a black hole tearing apart and consuming a star.
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