Search This Blog

This blog is to store what I consider to be important - or weird - stories about health and science. To read these, you will need the Adobe Reader; you may download it at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html Be sure to check out my political blog at: http://larblog.blogspot.com Welcome to my friends from LeftWingRadicals!

Friday, February 18, 2005

Brightest Galactic Flash Ever Detected Hits Earth

Imagine a star exploding in the sky and appearing as bright as a full moon. Now imagine that it's, say, Jupiter that does that. It would have to be a pretty big bang to appear so bright when Jupiter is 724 million miles from earth. Now imagine that the star that blew up is 50,000 light years away; that's 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. (300 quadrillion miles) In the Gamma ray band, that's how bright it appeared, and it was strong enough to disrupt our upper atmosphere a bit.
The article says that if it had been witin 60 trillion miles of us, it could have caused a mass extinction on earth.
Now, THAT'S a big bang!

No comments:

Followers