{"id":37595,"date":"2022-10-18T17:40:56","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T22:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=37595"},"modified":"2022-10-18T17:40:56","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T22:40:56","slug":"it-didnt-feel-that-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/10\/18\/it-didnt-feel-that-close\/","title":{"rendered":"It Didn’t Feel That Close"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spaceweather.com<\/strong><\/em> has a report<\/a> on an event that happened maybe 2.4 billion years ago – and just affected us a few days ago:<\/p>\n

\n
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Credit: NASA\/Swift\/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)<\/strong><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Oct. 17, 2022:<\/strong>\u00a0Astronomers have never seen anything quite like it. On Oct. 9, 2022, Earth-orbiting satellites detected the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) in modern history:\u00a0GRB221009A<\/a>. How strong was it? It caused electrical currents to flow through the surface of our planet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeow! And then that age thing:<\/p>\n

Researchers have since pinpointed the burst. It came from a dusty galaxy 2.4 billion light years away, almost certainly triggered by a supernova explosion giving birth to a black hole. This is actually the closest GRB ever recorded, thus accounting for its extreme intensity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I see that, by contrast, NASA<\/strong><\/em> is estimating 1.9 billion light years<\/a>. And gamma rays are potentially dangerous, as the Wikipedia<\/strong><\/em> page<\/a> notes. I wonder how much damage we’d sustain if that gamma ray burst had happened within our home galaxy, the Milky Way<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spaceweather.com has a report on an event that happened maybe 2.4 billion years ago – and just affected us a few days ago: Oct. 17, 2022:\u00a0Astronomers have never seen anything quite like it. On Oct. 9, 2022, Earth-orbiting satellites detected the strongest gamma-ray burst (GRB) in modern history:\u00a0GRB221009A. How strong \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37597,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37595\/revisions\/37597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}