Overview
- NASA’s Fermi telescope first spotted the event on July 2, with additional bursts later identified in data from the Chinese–European Einstein X-ray mission.
- Unlike known gamma-ray bursts that last milliseconds to minutes, this source repeated over roughly a day, making it unlike any previously documented GRB.
- Follow-up with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope places the source in another galaxy likely billions of light-years away, with the exact distance still being refined.
- An international team has published its analysis in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reporting that no established model fully accounts for the duration and repetition.
- The leading hypothesis points to a white dwarf torn apart by an intermediate-mass black hole, though further observations are underway to test that scenario.