jkochano (@jkochanok.bsky.social)

The Seven-Hour Mass Explosion That Broke the Rules of the Universe Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s ultimate flash in the pan. In a fraction of a second, they can violently release more energy than our Sun will emit over its entire ten-billion-year lifespan. Normally, these extreme flashes vanish almost as soon as they appear. They are one-and-done events. But on July 2, 2025, the cosmos delivered something that completely shattered our expectations. A gamma ray event known as GRB 250702B arrived on the detectors of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It did not fade in seconds. Instead, it kept going for seven hours, firing three distinct bursts over an entire day. It even left behind a glowing aftermath that lasted for months. Astronomers immediately recognized that they had caught a cosmic rule-breaker. “This is certainly an outburst unlike any other we have seen in the past 50 years,” said Eliza Neights, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. So, what happened? Two major independent studies are now racing to explain this cosmic anomaly: one reveals a massive, distorted galaxy that appears to be in the middle of a violent merger, while the other concludes we have finally caught a rare middleweight black hole in the act of shredding a sun-like... https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/the-seven-hour-mass-explosion-that-broke-the-rules-of-the-universe/