A recent cosmic discovery has left astronomers stunned. Earlier this summer, scientists detected an extraordinarily powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) unlike anything seen before. Typically, GRBs occur when a massive star dies in a supernova, releasing as much energy in seconds as the Sun will emit over its entire lifetime. But GRB 250702B defies this pattern completely.
This explosion lasted a remarkable seven hours — far longer than usual — and appeared to repeat several times during that period, which theoretically shouldn’t be possible since GRBs mark the complete destruction of a star.
A new theory, soon to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offers a chilling explanation: rather than a black hole consuming a star, this time a star swallowed a black hole.
According to the study, a dying star that had exhausted its fuel expanded to form a massive outer layer, pulling its small black hole companion inward. Once inside, the black hole tore apart the star’s core and began consuming it from within, producing an intense stream of particles — a jet — that appeared to us as a prolonged GRB.
“It’s like a GRB, but stretched over a much longer timescale,” said Daniel Perley from Liverpool John Moores University. Hendrik van Eerten from the University of Bath described the argument as “highly compelling.”
The event, detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on July 2, appeared as three distinct bursts coming from billions of light-years away. Other hypotheses, such as a collapsing star or a tidal disruption event, have been proposed but fail to account for the GRB’s duration and repetition. For now, this cosmic mystery continues to haunt scientists — much like the black hole that devoured its host.