Wow. A black hole may have fallen into a star, eating it up and causing three big gamma ray bursts! Never seen before.

The first gamma ray burst was detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on July 2, 2025. The second came 47 minutes later. The third came 188 minutes after that. These bursts were also seen by X-ray detectors.

At first people thought these bursts were coming from within our galaxy. But a day later, the Very Large Telescope found they were from a distant galaxy. This was soon confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope. So they had to be very powerful.

Repeated powerful bursts like this over a long period of time are unprecedented. Now a careful analysis has come out, which argues that they came from a black hole falling into a 'helium star'. This is a star that's already blown off its outer hydrogen layers, leaving a core of helium.

I'm not quite sure why they think it was a helium star - the paper is not easy to follow for nonexperts like me - but I think it's because these stars are massive yet small in size. They also considered the scenario of a black hole falling into a white dwarf, but rejected it.

These graphs show gamma rays as a function of time, detected by various detectors.

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If I made a series of videos about something, what would you like?

The Standard Model? Grand unified theories? General relativity? Clifford algebras? The octonions? Entropy? Category theory? Quantum logic and projective geometry? Visually beautiful math?

These would all be easy, since I've got the material prepared. I don't want to explain something brand new - at least not until I've covered some of these. Each of these topics could take at least 10 videos.

(I've got a drawing tablet now, so I'm ready to make videos where I show slides of stuff and also write while I talk. It will take some practice to do it well. I thank @Garrett for offering to pay for the tablet. It proved unnecessary, but it helped push me into action.)

@angelacollier talks about "conspiracy physics" so I don't have to.

It's a fun video - except near the end she threatens to quit making videos explaining physics because it's hopeless: her replies are flooded with people who misunderstand what she said.

I think this is inevitable with an audience as big as hers, and an approachable persona like hers. But I think for every goofball in the comment section there are a few people who learned something and don't feel the need to talk about it publicly. So I hope she keeps up hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miJbW3i9qQc

In a big city you can sometimes find a bodega, a boutique and an apothecary on the same block. But did you know these words are all related?

@timhenke pointed it out:

Bodega is a Spanish loanword from Latin "apotheca" from Greek "ἀποθήκη" (warehouse). The Latin word also gave Occitan "botica" which became French "boutique"!

Things are getting even stranger:

Peter Thiel is giving a series of lectures on the biblical Antichrist, organized by the Acts 17 Collective. “Acts” stands for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society”.

In these talks, Thiel argues that the time is ripe for the Antichrist to rise to power, promising peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation.

He has previously suggested that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist. Now he's being more cagey about who's the lucky winner.

But okay: regulating big tech will bring in the Antichrist.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA announced that it intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, who in turn promises to build 10 gigawatts worth of data centers using NVIDIA tech - but in undisclosed locations, working with partners who have not yet been named. It may not ever happen, but it looks like circular financing where NVIDIA pays to get Sam Altman to buy its stuff, and the investors actually funding this are supposed to go along with it.

The Antichrist is looking better every day....

https://archive.li/HcoiM

https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/

https://openai.com/index/openai-nvidia-systems-partnership/