Most Powerful Cosmic Explosions Since the Big Bang Seen

Gigantic cosmic explosions never seen before, the most powerful since the Big Bang, were discovered by chance by analyzing data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope : during its 10-year mission, which ended in January 2025, the instrument recorded sudden and extreme increases in brightness in the hearts of distant galaxies , colossal flashes of light that released energy equal to that produced in their entire lives by 100 Suns put together .

The analysis of the observed phenomena, published in the journal Science Advances and led by the University of Hawaii, has revealed a phenomenon both new and familiar: the cause is stars at least three times more massive than the Sun , torn apart by supermassive black holes with a violence never seen before.

“We’ve been watching stars being torn apart by black holes for over a decade,” says Jason Hinkle, who led the researchers. “But these events are different, reaching nearly 10 times the brightness we normally see. And not only are they much brighter than normal,” he adds, “they stay that way for years, far exceeding the energy released by even the brightest known supernova explosions .”

When a star is torn apart by a black hole, astrophysicists call it a 'tidal disruption event', but they have had to give this new phenomenon a different name: ' extreme nuclear transients '. Two such events were hidden in the data collected by Gaia, one detected in 2016 and one in 2018. Researchers have estimated that these phenomena are incredibly rare , about 10 million times rarer than supernovae, and could be one of the mechanisms that allow supermassive black holes to accumulate mass quickly and grow out of control.