I can only hoipe that this won’t happen again in the near future.
A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth’s worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago.
In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died.
Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives.