Jonathan Granot

For seven hours straight, a space gamma-ray telescope registered flares that refused to end. That is how the story of GRB 250702B began: the longest gamma-ray burst ever observed. Typical bursts last seconds, rarely minutes. This one stretched to 25,000 seconds, beating the previous record by a factor of two.

Radio waves from a gamma-ray burst — the cataclysmic death of a massive star whose flash briefly outshines an entire galaxy — reach Earth polarized. This means their electric field oscillates predominantly in a single plane, like a compass needle frozen in a magnetic field.