Our fragile earth and the biggest explosion ever detected

International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. O'Connor (UMD/GWU) & J. Rastinejad & W Fong (Northwestern Univ)

In a complete departure to my normal bird oriented blogs, I been reading an article on what was probably the biggest explosion every seen and its effect on our atmosphere.

It was caused by a supermassive star exploding in a supernova leaving behind a black hole. In a few seconds the energy released was equivalent to approximately one thousand times the output of our sun over its entire lifetime! We are actually witnessing an event that took place 2.4 billion years ago, halfway back to when the earth was created. Astonishingly, even though it was a staggering 2.4 billion light years from earth its effects were seen in our atmosphere. Radio transmitters detected a strange disturbance in our atmosphere which is thought to be due to a burst of gamma rays generated in the explosion. If this event had occurred in our stellar neighbour it would have probably wiped out all life on earth. The blast of gamma rays was so bright that it totaly overloaded earth based gamma ray detectors. I've read that if our eyes could detect gamma rays and we were looking up at the time we would have been blinded.

The explosion is the small pink dot right in the centre of the picture

How incredible fragile our earth is when viewed in a cosmic context!

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