{"id":227305,"date":"2025-12-17T01:43:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T07:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/whats-powering-these-mysterious-bright-blue-cosmic-flashes-astronomers-find-a-clue"},"modified":"2025-12-17T01:43:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T07:43:18","slug":"whats-powering-these-mysterious-bright-blue-cosmic-flashes-astronomers-find-a-clue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/whats-powering-these-mysterious-bright-blue-cosmic-flashes-astronomers-find-a-clue","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s powering these mysterious, bright blue cosmic flashes? Astronomers find a clue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/whats-powering-these-mysterious-bright-blue-cosmic-flashes-astronomers-find-a-clue.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Among the more puzzling cosmic phenomena discovered over the past few decades are brief and very bright flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that gradually fade away, leaving behind faint X-ray and radio emissions. With slightly more than a dozen discovered so far, astronomers have debated whether they are produced by an unusual type of supernova or by interstellar gas falling into a black hole.<\/p>\n<p>Analysis of the brightest such burst to date, discovered last year, shows that they\u2019re neither.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, a team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that these so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2025-06-biggest-boom-big-astronomers-uncover.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">luminous fast blue optical transients<\/a> (LFBOTs) are caused by an extreme tidal disruption, where a black hole of up to 100 times the mass of our sun completely shreds its massive star companion within days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among the more puzzling cosmic phenomena discovered over the past few decades are brief and very bright flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that gradually fade away, leaving behind faint X-ray and radio emissions. With slightly more than a dozen discovered so far, astronomers have debated whether they are produced by an unusual type of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}