BEIJING, February 21, 2026 (Xinhua) – Chinese researchers have developed a new model to explain the origin of an ultra-long gamma ray burst, challenging the traditional understanding of these violent cosmic phenomena.
Gamma ray bursts are among the most violent explosive phenomena in the universe, and usually last from milliseconds to a few minutes. However, the GRP 250702b event, which occurred on July 2, 2025, showed exceptional properties that sparked widespread controversy within the astrophysics community.
A research team from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a comprehensive analysis of monitoring data via satellites, including the Insight-HXMT and GECAM satellites. The team studied data for a period of 30 days around the time of the explosion, discovering that the emission of gamma rays continued for an unprecedented period of 29 hours, breaking previous records for the duration of this phenomenon.
The researchers also identified distinct temporal variations in the accompanying X-ray radiation. Based on these results, they proposed a new model stating that the original star of this explosion was an extremely massive star with a mass much greater than that of the Sun, in a recent study published in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal Letters.”
Unlike parent stars in regular gamma-ray bursts, the collapse process of very massive stars may extend over dozens of days. When a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, its core collapses first, forming a black hole, which quickly swallows the star’s inner matter, generating relativistic jets that move at speeds approaching the speed of light, which are the main source of gamma ray bursts. During the subsequent accretion process, slightly slower jets are generated, emitting X-ray radiation. /end of news/
