Deadly gamma-rays from an exploding star might have caused a mass extinction

In possibility , a supernova thousands of light-headed - years off could relinquish da Gamma - ray that would fry most life on Earth . But the star must be positioned exactly right for this to ever happen , and there ’s no way to turn out it . Until now .

The Ordovician Extinction of 450 million years ago is n’t nearly as illustrious as the K - T event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or the Permian - Triassic of 250 million yr ago , which is often anticipate the Great Dying and stamp out off 96 % of all nautical life and 70 % of land animate being . But the Ordovician was still enough bad , drive more than 60 % of all marine metal money extinct – and since almost all complex life-time still lived in the ocean back then , that was specially devastating .

We still do n’t know what exactly happen with the Ordovician – we know that there were two freestanding major extinction event separated by about a million years . C dioxide was heavy Byzantine in one of these extinctions , which suggests a likely perpetrator for at least one of them was extreme volcanic blast .

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It ’s the other extinction event that defy well-off account , and the pursuit to explain this mystery has led a small radical of scientists to put forward a radical theory : it was all induce by a gamma - ray burst . Specifically , this explosion must have come from a massive starring blowup known as a hypernova – an explosion at least a hundred prison term more powerful than the average supernova – that happened about a thousand light - year away .

sure enough , if a da Gamma - beam burst from an passing powerful hypernova ever did hit Earth , it would be perfectly crushing . A powerful explosion lasting just ten seconds would be enough to strip the satellite of one-half of the ozone layer , bathing all being near the surface in lots of ultraviolet radiation . Indeed , open - dwelling organisms did seem to be the first to go in one of the extinguishing events , but the trouble is that a da Gamma - ray burst of this sort is so ridiculously unlikely .

When first purport back in 2003 , this hypothesis was pretty much untestable , as there was no way to find grounds that such a fusillade had ever happened – as you might imagine , explosions as violent as hypernovas do n’t leave much grounds of their universe behind . Without any evidence that such a burst ever occurred , the whole speculation is pretty much worthless , scientifically speaking .

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But that may be about to switch . Wilfred Domainko , a physicist at Germany ’s Max Plank Institute , says that , if the gamma - ray salvo ever did happen , it most in all likelihood came from a spheric cluster . Because the stars in these clusters are so tightly pack together , dead stars can become attracted to one another and merge . When they do merge , a massive plosion result , one bragging enough to loose such a gamma - ray burst .

The question then is whether any clusters were near enough to Earth for a burst to affect us . As far as Domainko is have-to doe with , the betting odds are good that this has happened at least once in the last billion years . The Gaia Star - Mapper , a European Space Agency probe due to lead off body of work in 2013 , will be come to with mapping the positions and velocities of , among other thing , all these globular clusters .

Once we have that information , it would be potential to generalise whether any of these clusters were in just the right billet in time and space to unleash a da Gamma - re burst that could have caused an extinction event here on Earth . If one or more were in the right position to cause the Ordovician extinction , then that would seriously boost the credibility of the hypothesis , although even then there ’s only a distant chance of really finding fragments of the original hypernova .

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