(TJV) Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most violent explosions in the cosmos, releasing more energy in seconds than our Sun will emit over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Typically, they occur only once — the final death cry of a collapsing star.

But as Futurism and The New York Post report, astronomers have now observed something never seen before: a gamma ray burst that repeated itself multiple times in a single day, almost as if the star had suffered multiple deaths.

“This event is unlike any other seen in 50 years of GRB observations,” said Antonio Martin-Carrillo, an astronomer at University College Dublin and coauthor of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “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.”

Designated GRB 250702B, the strange burst was first detected on July 2 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which recorded three distinct explosions. The Einstein Probe, an X-ray telescope, had actually spotted activity almost a full day earlier.

“This is 100–1000 times longer than most GRBs,” said Andrew Levan, co-lead author and astronomer at Radboud University. Even more puzzling, Martin-Carrillo noted, the signals appeared periodic — another first in gamma ray research.

At first, scientists suspected the source was inside the Milky Way, but follow-up observations with the HAWK-I infrared camera on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile revealed the blast originated billions of light years away, making it vastly more powerful than initial estimates.

“What we found was considerably more exciting: the fact that this object is extragalactic means that it is considerably more powerful,” Martin-Carrillo said.

As for what caused it, astronomers have theories but no definitive answers. One possibility is that a massive star collapsed in an unprecedented way, somehow continuing to fuel bursts long after its supposed destruction. Another explanation is a tidal disruption event — a black hole tearing apart a star — though the details don’t fit typical scenarios.

To make sense of the explosion, some suggest the culprit could be an intermediate-mass black hole, a long-theorized but never directly observed “missing link” between stellar and supermassive black holes.

“If this is a massive star, it is a collapse unlike anything we have ever witnessed before,” Levan explained. Martin-Carrillo added, “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.”