Is that Mammy Miami? LMAO

That was my first thought, we ****ing gave up R12 for this?

Could you be more specific? "anywhere from tomorrow to 500,000 years from now"

That is one heck of a percentage of error. Give or take 500k years.

Honestly, in 10,000 years we will have wiped ourselves out so not much to be concerned about.

Ban Aquanet pimps & logic haters.

First thing I thought of too! Damn comic geek.

Pay attention...it takes 8,000 years for the gamma rays and optical photons (light) to get to earth. 104 could have gone supernova 7,999 years ago. So tomorrow everyone dies. Get it...?

Apparently he didn't or he wouldn't need Dave's help.

So that grade 8 sun tan lotion will not work anymore if this happens, hope it can wait until after this summer, because I have a half a bottle left.

:facepalm:

We look into the past.

No it is not. "intensive purposes" is a common malapropism. It is "for all intents and purposes" You only have to look at the words in the context of what they are supposed to mean to know which one is right and which one makes no sense at all.

Everyone who says "for all intensive purposes" is wrong.

Even if we see the supernova tomorrow, the odds that we'll get hit are very, very low. Gamma Ray bursts are shot out in a line. They may think that based on its rotation its aimed right at us, but it only has to be slightly off a fraction of a degree to miss.

Oh man, I just bought two bags of charcoal and now I'm not going to need them. Bummer.

http://www.universetoday.com/23342/w...-us-after-all/


Early last year, concern was growing for a Wolf-Rayet star named WR 104 that appeared to be aiming right at Earth (see Looking Down the Barrel of A Gamma Ray Burst). A Wolf-Rayet star is a highly unstable star coming to the end of its life, possibly culminating in a powerful, planet-killing gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRBs are collimated beams of high energy gamma-rays, projected from the poles of a collapsing Wolf-Rayet star. It was little wonder that we were concerned when a dying Wolf-Rayet star was found to be pointing right at us! Today, at the AAS in Long Beach, one scientist working at the Keck Telescope has taken a keen interest in WR 104 and shared new findings that show our Solar System may not be bathed in deadly gamma-rays after all…

Wolf-Rayet stars are evolved massive stars undergoing a suicidal and violent death. They are very hot (up to 50,000K) and losing mass very quickly, generating powerful stellar winds (at velocities of 2000 km/s). WR 104 was imaged using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii last March, and images of the pinwheel spiral star system appeared to show that we were “looking down a rifle barrel”.

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So what is causing this spiral structure around WR 104? The star has a binary O-type star partner, so as WD 104 sheds its mass, the stellar winds spiral outward. As we are seeing the full spiral from Earth, it was therefore reasonable to assume the binary system was facing right toward us. As WR 104 probably has its pole pointing 90° from the ecliptic plane, any future GRB could be directed straight at us.

“WR 104 is a fascinating object that got a lot of press last spring,” Dr Grant Hill said during the AAS meeting today (Jan 7th). “Since the object is in our galaxy, it could be devastating [for Earth]”

Hill therefore decided to confirm previous Keck observations with spectroscopic data to find out if there could be the possibility of an Earth-directed GRB. His work confirms the system is a binary pair, orbiting each other at an 8 month period. Hill also confirmed the presence of a shock front between the stellar winds of WD 104 and O-type partner. And there is some very good news for Earth. It would appear the original Keck imagry may not have been as straight-forward as it seemed. Spectroscopic emission lines from the binary pair strongly suggest the system is in fact inclined 30°-40° (possibly as much as 45°) away from us.

So, Earth doesn’t appear to be in the firing line of WR 104 after all…

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/23342/w...#ixzz2VG4nhIHy