What happens if a gamma ray hits you

Discovering a planet that ticks all the boxes for habitability may sound promising, but perhaps less so if a GRB or supernova recently occurred nearby. In the hunt for life we also need to consider the possibility that any life that might have existed on a distant planet could already be extinct. Written by Aaron Gronstal Source astrobio. Credit: NASA. The marine life of the Ordovician fell victim to a mass extinction, the cause of which might have been a gamma ray burst.

The ozone layer in the stratosphere blocks harmful UV radiation from reaching the surface of the Earth. Nature's snapshot. Last year, a team of researchers found that some ancient cedar trees in Japan had an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon In Antarctica, too, there was a spike in levels of a form of beryllium - beryllium - in the ice.

These isotopes are created when intense radiation hits the atoms in the upper atmosphere, suggesting that a blast of energy had once hit our planet from space. Using tree rings and ice-core data, researchers were able to pinpoint that this would have occurred between the years AD and AD , but the cause of the event was a puzzle. The possibility of a supernova - an exploding star - was put forward, but then ruled out because the debris from such an event would still be visible in telescopes today.

Another team of US physicists recently published a paper suggesting that an unusually large solar flare from the Sun could have caused the pulse of energy. However some others in the scientific community disagree because they do not think that the energy produced would tally with the levels of carbon and beryllium found.

So now German researchers have offered up another explanation: a massive explosion that took place within the Milky Way. One of the authors of the paper, Professor Ralph Neuhauser, from the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Jena, said: "We looked in the spectra of short gamma-ray bursts to estimate whether this would be consistent with the production rate of carbon and beryllium that we observed - and [we found] that is fully consistent.

Another question still remains: could we be vaporised by a nearby GRB? The answer is no, even though there are GRBs detected almost everyday, scattered randomly throughout the Universe, it is highly unlikely.

There are no stars within light years of our Solar System that are of the type destined to explode as a GRB, so we do not expect to witness such an event at close range! You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!

Danger to life? It also serves as a sort of "early warning" of incoming bursts, and measures their intensities and locations. Edited and updated by Carolyn Collins Petersen. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.

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Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. John P. Millis, Ph. Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Updated January 10, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Millis, John P. Radiation in Space Gives Clues about the Universe. Exploring the Hidden Infrared Universe.