Strange New Bursts of Gamma Rays Point to a New Way to Destroy a Star

An artist's impression of the stars creating gamma-ray bursts. The background blue star is the progenitor of a standard long duration gamma-ray burst. A so-called Wolf-Rayet star, it has a mass ten or more times the mass of the sun but has a comparable size. The foreground star is the suggested progenitor of an ultra-long gamma-ray burst (GRB). It has a mass of perhaps 20 times the sun but is up to a thousand times larger. In both cases the GRB is produced by a jet punching through the star, but in the case of the ultra-long GRBs the much larger size of the star creates a much longer lived jet. Image copyright Mark A. Garlick, used with permission by the University of Warwick (Credit: Image copyright Mark A. Garlick, used with permission by the University of Warwick)