GRB 110328A is the longest lasting gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected by the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission

Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission

The Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission consists of a robotic spacecraft called Swift, which was launched into orbit on 20 November 2004, 17:16:00 UTC on a Delta II 7320-10C expendable launch vehicle. Swift is managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and was developed by an international...

 on March 28, 2011. The explosion occurred in the center of small galaxy in the Draco constellation, about 3.8 billion years ago.

Studied by dozens of telescopes, it's one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts of high-energy radiation ever observed when it comes to brightness, variability and durability. It probably came when a star wandered too close to the central black hole in the galaxy, and was gravitationally torn apart and swallowed by it. The beam of radiation appears to be pointed directly toward Earth. Timing considerations suggest that the tidally disrupted star was a white dwarf

White dwarf

A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a small star composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. They are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. Its faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored...

 and not a regular main sequence

Main sequence

The main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell...

 star

"This is truly different from any explosive event we have seen before," said Joshua Bloom

Joshua Bloom

Joshua Simon Bloom is an American astrophysicist and associate professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Bachelor of Arts in astronomy and astrophysics and physics from the Harvard College in 1996, an M.Phil from Cambridge University in 1997, and a Ph.D...

 of the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

 at Berkeley

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

, the lead author of the study published in the June 2011 issue of Science

Science (journal)

Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

.