USATODAY.com – Interstellar deathray not likely to hit Earth
Doomsayers and Chicken Little-types can now strike “deathray from a star” from their list of possible ways to die.
A new study finds that the chances of a gamma ray burst going off in our galaxy and destroying life on Earth are comfortingly close to zero.
Gamma ray bursts, or GRBs, are focused beams of gamma radiation emitted from the magnetic poles of black holes formed during the collapse of ancient, behemoth stars. They can also form when dead neutron stars merge with each other or with black holes.
It’s been speculated that if a GRB went off near our solar system, and one of the beams hit Earth, it could set off a global mass extinction.
But in a new study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers found that GRBs tend to occur in small, metal-poor galaxies and estimated that the likelihood of one occurring in our own metal-rich Milky Way is less than 0.15%.