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The Einstein space observatory has seen a 'dirty' star explosion for the first time — a key to unraveling the deaths of massive stars.
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Massive stars end their lives in a colossal explosion, which Fritz Zwicky called a supernova. The core crushes down into a black hole or a neutron star. Sometimes, a narrow jet bursts out — a clean fireball racing at nearly the speed of light, creating a gamma-ray burst, the brightest firework in the Universe. But if the blast scoops up too much cosmic debris, the jet becomes dirty and can't accelerate as fiercely. Until now, these dirty fireballs were just a hypothesis.
The new Einstein Probe telescope spotted a flash in a distant galaxy called EP241113a. It looked like a gamma-ray burst, but in X-ray light, and its jet moved just a whisker slower than usual—99.87% of light speed compared to 99.995% for clean ones. That tiny difference was enough to place it in the long-sought dirty class. In just a couple of seconds, this dirty fireball unleashed as much energy as the Sun will produce over 10 billion years.