202K views · 1.1K shares | Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest, most violent explosions in the universe, but they can be surprisingly tricky to detect. So how did we discover them? It was sort of an accident. Get the details and see how the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope helps us study these events today: https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/176492220069/gamma-ray-bursts-black-hole-birth-announcements | NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Facebook

NASA has detected the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, an extreme cosmic explosion that lasted nearly seven hours — far longer than typical gamma-ray bursts, which usually fade within seconds or minutes. This unprecedented event is believed to have occurred when a black hole plunged into a massive star, tearing through it from the inside while feeding on stellar material. As the star collapsed, the black hole formed a hot spinning accretion disk and launched powerful relativistic jets, rel