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POPSDeath rays from space
"Every square centimeter on the top of the Earth's atmosphere is hit by several cosmic rays per second," Fields says. "This is forever going on." At present, the average human receives the equivalent of about 10 chest X-rays per year from cosmic rays. We shouldn't be alarmed by this, since it is just part of the natural background radiation under which humans and our ancestors have been exposed to for eons. Indeed, cosmic-ray-induced mutations may sometimes be beneficial. "It is clear that in some way cosmic rays shaped evolution of organisms on Earth," says Franco Ferrari from the University of Szczecin in Poland. Although 30 light-years is small on a galactic scale, Fields thinks it likely that Earth has been caught in a supernova "kill radius" as many as a dozen times over our 4.5-billion-year history. However, a nearby supernova is not the only way to increase the cosmic ray intensity. As our Sun orbits around the galactic center, it regularly passes through one of th
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POPSMysterious Betelgeuse Measurements in 2008 revealed the star is probably about 640 light years from Earth. In other words, it takes light about 640 years to travel from that star to Earth. This means that all of the observations we are now making are of a star as it was 640 years ago. There is a possibility that the star has already gone supernova! Kabooom!
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POPSIs a Death Star Aimed at Earth? A massive burst of gamma rays may already be on it's way, somehow the state of the economy doesn't seem so important. So, .....live life like there's no tomorrow.......there may not be.
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POPSYoungest Exploded Star In The Milky Way Is Discovered
It turns out, Green and his team came across the remnants, now called G1.9+0.3, more than 20 years ago using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in Socorro, NM, and estimated the object’s age to be 400-1,000 years old. It is near the center of the Milky Way, some 25,000 light-years from Earth. By comparing notes, the astronomers learned the images taken more than two decades apart documented the expansion of debris from the star's explosion. The images taken in 2007 were about 16 percent larger than the ones taken in 1985. "This is a huge difference," said Reynolds. "It means the explosion debris is expanding very quickly, which in turn means the object is much younger than we originally thought." Reynolds also observed the object with the VLA radio telescope to confirm the supernova remnant's rapid expansion. Unlike visible-light telescopes, radio and X-ray telescopes can penetrate the thick clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy.
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POPS'Death Star' Gamma-Ray Gun Pointed Straight at Earth "Sometimes, supernovae like the one that will one day destroy WR104 focus their energy into a narrow beam of very destructive gamma-ray radiation along the axis of the system," he warns. "If such a 'gamma-ray burst' happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way." Even a short gamma-ray burst at supernova strength could zap away half the Earth's ozone layer, drastically increasing the amount of deadly space radiation that penetrates our atmosphere.
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POPSObama Mania Doc, from Supernova Earth, has written a fantastic essay on the creepy emotional reaction that Obama inspires.
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