A black gap fell right into a star – then ate its means out once more

A black gap that was eaten by a star appears to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the within, producing a gamma-ray burst noticed about 9 billion light-years from Earth.

The burst, known as GRB 250702B, was first noticed by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in July. Such bursts are shiny flashes attributable to jets fired out from energetic occasions, equivalent to huge stars collapsing into black holes or neutron stars merging, they usually normally final no quite a lot of minutes.

GRB 250702B, nevertheless, lasted for 25,000 seconds – or about 7 hours – making it the longest-known gamma-ray burst. Scientists had struggled to elucidate it, however Eliza Neights at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre within the US and her colleagues now recommend an uncommon and uncommon chance.

“The only [model] which naturally explains the properties observed in GRB 250702B is the fall of a stellar-mass black hole into a star,” the researchers write in a paper about their work.

In more-typical lengthy gamma-ray bursts, an enormous star collapses to kind a black gap, launching jets because it dies. In this case, the group suggests the reverse – a pre-existing black gap spiralled right into a companion star whose outer layers had expanded late in its life, inflicting the black gap to lose angular momentum and fall in the direction of the star’s core.

The black gap would then have consumed the star from the inside-out, producing the highly effective jets seen as GRB 250702B and presumably triggering a faint supernova, albeit one which was too dim to detect at this distance, even with the James Webb Space Telescope.

This rationalization is smart for the way an ultra-long burst like this would possibly happen, says Hendrik van Eerten on the University of Bath within the UK. “The argument posed in this paper is a very compelling one,” he says.

Neights and her colleagues hope that extra occasions like this is perhaps noticed sooner or later, thanks to imminent telescopes just like the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. For now, this gamma ray burst stays “an absurdity”, says Van Eerten.

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