badastronomy.com — Yesterday, a gamma-ray burst went off that was so bright that had you been looking at the right spot in the sky you could have seen it with just your own eyes! GRBs are monumental explosions, the exploding of a massive star where most of the energy of the catastrophe is channeled into twin beams of energy.
Mar 20, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountMar 21, 2008
If it were exploding in the cosmic neighbourhood say within the milky way the atmosphere would contain great concentration of Nitric Oxide witch with water is quite powerful acid. (this is bad!) Fortunately this doesn't happen much often
pitdogMar 21, 2008
We can't go faster than light YET.
tommyboy919Mar 21, 2008
YES! That means my death ray works! Muahahahaha!
spacemonkeyzeroMar 21, 2008
If one happens in the Milky Way, all our troubles will be solved!
emjaymjMar 21, 2008
Not impossible. All it has to do is travel close enough to the speed of light that it reaches you before the visual information travels from your retina, through the optic nerve, and on to your brain which then needs to process it. We're talking a really minuscule amount of time here, but we're also talking about gamma rays, which for all useful purposes IS light.
assassyn360Mar 22, 2008
In case of potential Gamma radiation exposure duck and cover.
stevesjobsMar 22, 2008
I wonder if the people on that star's neighboring planets did anything to try to stop this.
elwoodherringApr 18, 2008
If sound could travel through space, then the earth-shattering kaboom would reach us in approximately the year 7,190,091,986,002,008 AD by my calculations (assuming sound travels at 700mph and started out at the same time the light started out 7.5 billion years ago.)The Earth wasn't formed when that thing went off, and it's pretty safe to assume the earth will have been consumed in the Sun's final red giant phase by the time any shock wave reaches us.