Rhythms of Black Holes: 34 Pulsations in Gamma-Ray Bursts express
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe: a dying star collapses into a black hole, ejecting streams of energy. Often this happens after a supernova flare. But astronomers caught a strange rhythm — in the emission of 34 such bursts, clear pulsations appeared, like beats of a cosmic heart. The secret of this rhythm hides in the twisted spacetime around the black hole. The effect discovered by Josef Lense makes even empty space rotate, dragging along superheated gas that alternately compresses and stretches, giving rise to periodic bursts. This resembles a heartbeat — only the size of a solar system. Some pulsations speed up or slow down, as if a heart changes rhythm from excitement. These studies confirm the ideas of John Archibald Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole." The pulsations open a window into the very core of the gravitational funnel, where matter performs its farewell dance before vanishing.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2510.11136
I report on the discovery of 34 new quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in the prompt light curves of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from the Swift/BAT catalog: with one or more constant leading periods, as well as several chirping signals. This is the largest homogenously identified sample or GRB QPOs to date. The presence of QPOs suggests the existence of characteristic time scales that at least in some GRBs might be related to the dynamical properties of plasma trajectories in the accretion disks powering the relativistic jets. Several scenarios for their origin were examined. We identify non-planar orbits around Kerr black holes, the Lense-Thirring effect, and shock oscillations as plausible mechanisms for the QPO generation.
These cosmic heartbeats can be extremely fast: some pulsation periods are less than a millisecond — in that time, light travels only 300 kilometers, yet more energy is released than the Sun emits in an entire year.