Death-Star cometh

The following article gives some info on a Binary system in Saggitarius, one consisting of a Wolf-Rayet. As we know Wolf-Rayets are ticking bombs - the problem? Well, the axis of this system is pointed toward earth so when it goes bang, we may be in the firing line for a gamma ray burst. Keep your shades on

www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080310-mm-grb-us.html

The Gamma rays would be bad enough but we might also all be riddled with Oh-My-God particles:

"The Oh-My-God particle (a play on the nickname "God particle" for the Higgs boson) is the nickname given to a particle observed on the evening of October 15, 1991, over Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, estimated to have an energy of approximately 3 × 1020 electronvolts, equivalent to about 50 joules — in other words, it was a subatomic particle with macroscopic kinetic energy equal to that of a baseball (140 g) which is moving at about 27 m/s (60 mph). These very high energy cosmic rays are however very rare and most cosmic rays possess an energy between 107 eV and 1010 eV.

It was most likely a proton travelling with velocity almost equal to the speed of light (if it was a proton, its speed would have been approximately (1 − 5 × 10−24) c; after traveling one year the particle would be only 46 nanometres behind a photon that left at the same time[1]) and its observation was a shock to astrophysicists.

Since the first observation, by the University of Utah's Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector, at least fifteen similar events have been recorded, confirming the phenomenon."

Do you mean keep your shades on as in "Men in Black" - or - to just look cool

Just to look cool of course - you'd need more than just shades if this is pointing directly at us and it goes Kapow (technical term).

BTW heres an interesting detailed account of the OMG particle mentioned above. www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/

John, I read the mentioned article on the Oh, my god particle....and got as far as the bottom of the first paragraph.....before my brain turned into warm sticky porridge.....

Looks like the duck and cover strategy wont work for this particle. :shock: