A Binary Star Is About to Go Supernova and Could Produce a Gamma-Ray Burst
>Of course, it's important to bear in mind that "just about to explode" means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.
This is a better article (From bad astronomy) about the same thing: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-this-cosmic-sprinkler-surro...
In particular, the sciencealert article mentions "very old" Wolf-Rayet stars, which is a little strange given that they only last a few million years, and certainly are not old on any scale used for stellar lifetimes.
About to?
> It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years.
I understand this is imminent on a cosmological timescale, but the title is click-baity.
Maybe the explosion has already happened? But we still wouldn’t be able to see it yet due to the distance and speed of light...
I’m not enough of an astrophysicist to do this math myself, but what would this kind of burst look like from Earth? Observable w a telescope? W the naked eye? Enter a bomb shelter and save yourself?
From the article itself:
"Of course, it's important to bear in mind that 'just about to explode' means something different in cosmic terms versus human terms. It could happen at any time in the... next few hundred thousand years."
So a clickbait title.
Don't think GRBs are all that worrisome, by comparison.
It has recently been calculated that there is a 50-percent chance that a GRB-induced mass extinction on Earth has occurred in the past 500 million years. This abstract: ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2506 ) links to a PDF of the entire paper.
So the probability in a human lifetime is magnitudes less than a supervolcano event or big asteroid impact.
According to ( https://phys.org337426962/pdf.pdf ): "The researchers don't believe a GRB striking the Earth could penetrate the atmosphere, but do believe one could destroy the ozone layer".
We started to do that to ourselves more than once, not long ago. We are by far the highest-probability danger to Earth life. Chlorofluorocarbons: check. Nuclear weapons: check.
Back to less-likely (inhuman) radiation sources: In the late 8th century, tree rings in the northern hemisphere 'recorded' a one-year atmospheric increase of 1% in carbon-14 ... 20 times normal. Cause: 'an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation'.
Cause unknown, but could have been ... a coronal mass ejection (the Sun).
( https://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radiation-burst-recor... )
With this close proximity, isn't there a good chance we may be hit directly with the gamma ray burst ? Shouldn't we be alarmed about another possible mass extinction event ?
I always get excited when I read these things that I might be lucky enough to see a supernova in the sky in my lifetime (provided the gamma ray burst misses us!).
About to go in cosmic terms would mostly mean not earlier than a millennium.
about?
I would like to see Neil Degrasse Tyson do a season 2 of Cosmos with all these new discoveries. We're only going to keep discovering more.
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The more I scroll the more convinced I become of the strong scientific rigour of this publication. I even saw a few ads from Elsevier, so you know it's the good stuff.
Time to uncomment that code Microsoft! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494690