Yesterday, Earth happened to cross a gamma ray burst beam. Had we been within a few thousand light years of the source, all life on Earth would be extinct by now. Everyone we love would have been gone. Life on Earth would have been terminated. It would have been a quick death because the devastation moves toward us at the speed of light--there would not be any advanced warning.
We were so lucky, the source is about 7,500,000,000 light years away, so I am still typing and you are still reading this. (One light year is about 9,460,000,000,000 km.)
The Bad Astronomer Blog has a good write up about this. A particular interesting passage:
"Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.
The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.
In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst."
We were so lucky, the source is about 7,500,000,000 light years away, so I am still typing and you are still reading this. (One light year is about 9,460,000,000,000 km.)
The Bad Astronomer Blog has a good write up about this. A particular interesting passage:
"Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.
The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.
In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst."
CNN also has a news article about this event.
BTW, the picture of the satellite on this post is the Swift satellite, the detector of yesterday's burst. It was designed specifically to look for gamma ray sources in the sky.
