Telescopes operating up and down the electromagnetic spectrum have confirmed that the longest gamma ray burst (GRB) was produced by a jet of material traveling at close to the speed of light in a distant galaxy. The environment in which the jet was moving was particularly dusty, which obscured our view at visible wavelengths, but we don’t know if that’s relevant to its extreme length. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

More than 15,000 GRBs have been detected in the 52 years since we gained the capacity to find them. Many of these last less than two seconds and come from within the Milky Way. Longer bursts come from other galaxies, but are still usually a matter of seconds or a few minutes. The GRB detected on July 2 thi

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