A distant blast that kept shining for hours instead of seconds has forced astronomers to rethink how some of the universe’s most violent events unfold. The signal, a strangely persistent eruption of high energy light, arrived from billions of light years away and refused to fade on the schedule theory predicted. For researchers, it is the latest and most dramatic sign that deep space is sending messages that current models can only partly decode.
At the same time, a growing menagerie of other odd signals, from heartbeat-like radio pulses to clockwork flashes every 44 minutes, is revealing a sky that is far less predictable than textbooks once suggested. Taken together, these events hint that the cosmos is running physical experiments on scales no laboratory on Earth can match, and we are only just beginning to read the results.
The gamma ray burst that would not end
The centerpiece of this new mystery is a gamma ray burst that stayed “on” for roughly seven hours, a duration that sits awkwardly between known categories of such explosions. Classified as GRB 250702B, it erupted about 8 billion light years away in the constellation Scutum, and its jet of material appears to have raced outward at up to 99 percent of the speed of light. Typical long gamma ray bursts last tens of seconds, while ultra long events can stretch to thousands, but a clean seven hour plateau of activity does not fit either family comfortably.
Gamma ray bursts, or GRBs, are already known as the most energetic explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and astronomers usually detect at least one such event every day somewhere on the sky. What makes this one stand out is not just its length but the way its brightness evolved, with a sustained high energy phase that looked more like an engine idling than a single catastrophic blast. That behavior has led some teams to argue that a newborn compact object, perhaps a rapidly spinning magnetized core, kept feeding the outflow long after the initial collapse.
How telescopes chased the afterglow
Once the first alert went out, astronomers around the world scrambled to catch the fading light in as many wavelengths as possible. High energy satellites flagged the initial spike, and then ground based observatories pivoted to track the afterglow as it cooled from gamma rays to X rays, optical light, and radio waves. This rapid response allowed researchers to pin down the distance, confirm the location in Space, and study how the jet plowed into its surroundings over time.
That coordinated campaign built on a pattern that has become standard for extreme transients. When the burst triggered detectors, astronomers leaped into action, using the world’s telescopes to follow the event across the spectrum and reconstruct the physics of the explosion. The emerging picture suggests a jet that stayed remarkably stable as it tunneled through the debris of a massive star, which may explain why the signal looked more like a drawn out beacon than a brief flash.
A universe of strange rhythms
The seven hour burst is not the only cosmic signal that seems to be running on an unfamiliar clock. Earlier work on fast radio bursts uncovered a source that emitted a repeating pattern of radio waves with a regular, heartbeat like structure, a signal that lasted up to three seconds and came from about 3 billion light years away. That event, described as News in the field, stood out because most fast radio bursts last only milliseconds and do not show such clean periodicity.
The instrument that caught that heartbeat was the large radio telescope known as CHIME, which has become a workhorse for hunting these fleeting signals. Researchers now suspect that at least some fast radio bursts come from magnetars, the highly magnetized collapsed cores of giant stars, whose intense fields can twist and snap to release bursts of radio energy. The regular pattern in that particular source hints at a rotating object whose beam sweeps past Earth like a lighthouse, but the exact mechanism that produces such long, structured pulses remains an open question.
The 10 second flash from the early universe
More recently, another deep space signal has pushed the limits of what astronomers thought they would see from the distant cosmos. Humanity just received a 10 second signal from 13 billion light years away, a mysterious flash that appears to be tied to a supernova in the early universe. What makes this event remarkable is not only its distance but the way the energy unfolded over those 10 seconds, which does not match the standard templates used to classify stellar explosions.
The first hint of this event came when the Space Variable Objects Monitor, or SVOM, picked up a sudden spike in high energy light that lasted roughly 10 seconds and did not fit any known pattern in its onboard catalog. Follow up analysis suggested that the signal came from an event that occurred when the universe was less than a billion years old, making it one of the earliest such explosions ever detected. As researchers dug deeper, they found that the time profile of the flash, described in detail under the phrase Humanity Just Received, may point to a type of stellar death that current models do not fully capture.
The 44 minute metronome and an eccentric star
Closer to home in cosmic terms, another puzzle is flashing at a far more leisurely pace. Astronomers have reported a mystery object that sends signals toward Earth every 44 m, a rhythm so slow and so regular that one team described it as “like nothing we have ever seen.” The pulses, which repeat with that 44 m cadence, have been tracked over multiple cycles, ruling out many mundane explanations and suggesting a highly unusual compact object or magnetic configuration.
Follow up work with X ray and radio observatories has tied this behavior to an eccentric source known as ASKAP J1832, which shows dramatic changes in radio wave intensity every 44 minutes. Teams using the Chandra X ray Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array Pa have been monitoring this object to test whether it might be an ultra long period magnetar, a white dwarf with an unusual magnetic field, or something even stranger. The regularity of the pulses, highlighted in reports that describe how Astronomers are baffled by the signals at Earth, suggests a stable underlying clock, but the energy output and spectrum do not line up neatly with known classes of pulsars.
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