Scientists Intrigued by Black Hole That Fell Into Star, Then Ate It From the Inside

"But this new one, dubbed GRB 250702B, blows everything we know about these fearsome blasts out the water. For starters, it lasted a staggering seven hours, which is vastly longer than they typically do. And it also appeared to repeat several times over its run, which shouldn't be possible. A GRB is produced by the total obliteration of a star, so how could the same source emit multiple blasts?"

"In an inversion of the well known scenario of a black hole devouring a star, the researchers propose that a star actually swallowed a black hole. Once subsumed, the massive infiltrator begins to rip apart the star's core, then devour the rest of its host from the inside out, producing an incredibly energetic stream of particles called a jet."

"Death by black hole is not an unusual fate for a star. The most well known form are tidal disruption events, which occur when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole that weighs millions if not billions of solar masses and are often found in the heart of a galaxy. The object's ungodly gravity shreds the star down into a stream of material as it floats closer."

Astronomers detected an unprecedented gamma-ray burst, GRB 250702B, that lasted seven hours and produced several repeated bursts. Typical gamma-ray bursts arise from a star's catastrophic collapse in a supernova, releasing in moments as much energy as the Sun will emit over its lifetime; the duration and repetition of GRB 250702B conflict with that model. A proposed explanation inverts the usual scenario: a star engulfs a black hole, which subsumes and then rips apart the star's core before devouring the host from the inside out. The inward destruction can launch an intense relativistic jet capable of extended, repeated gamma-ray emission. This differs from tidal disruption events around supermassive black holes, which shred stars into streams.

Read at Futurism