When a large star reaches the end of its life, it may collapse in on itself, releasing unimaginable amounts of energy in the process. This event is known as a gamma-ray burst.

Depending on the mass of the star, it can release more energy in this one rapid event than our sun will in its entire 10 billion-year life. When this happens, all the remaining material of the star gets ejected out into space, utterly destroying it.

With that in mind, you can imagine how surprised scientists were when their instruments detected a gamma ray burst that occurred three times in one day. A single burst should completely destroy the star, so how could this happen? Antonio Martin-Carrillo is an astronomer at University College Dublin, Ireland, is a coauthor of a new study on this event that was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. In a statement on the study, he said:

“This event is unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations. GRBs are catastrophic events, so they are expected to go off just once because the source that produced them does not survive the dramatic explosion.”

The researchers looked at various different possible explanations, including something like a binary star system where each star caused the other to collapse at roughly the same time. This, however, still would not explain what was seen here.

This event was first detected on July 2nd, 2025, when NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope identified the bursts. While looking into it, they learned that the X-ray telescope known as the Einstein Probe had also picked up the same activity a day earlier. Andrew Levan is a co-lead author of the study and a Radboud University astronomer. In the statement, he commented:

“This is 100-1000 times longer than most GRBs.”

So, the mystery just keeps getting more unusual.

While it was originally assumed that this event took place within our own galaxy becuase the signals came in from a direction that is on the same galactic plane, it was eventually discovered that this is not the case. The fact that it came from outside the Milky Way means that it was even more powerful than originally assumed.

Levan commented on this, saying:

“If this is a massive star, it is a collapse unlike anything we have ever witnessed before. We are still not sure what produced this or if we can ever really find out, but, with this research, we have made a huge step forward towards understanding this extremely unusual and exciting object.”

Astronomers are continuing to go through the data that was collected on this event, hoping to figure out what could have possibly caused the three bursts of energy that have never been witnessed before.

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