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Australian astronomers are keeping an eye on an exploding star they call WR104 that could end all life on earth. Before you say it couldn’t happen, note that a smaller version of this has happened here before.

This star is actually TWO stars and it’s getting ready to explode at any time. When a binary start like this one collapses into a black hole, it releases a huge burst of lethal gamma rays.

Whitley?s new novel “The Omega Point,” which will be published in the fall of 2009, deals with this situation.

Art credit: NASA
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when the Europeans arrived – Debris from an exploding star (a supernova) wiped out mostof the large animals (including humans) living in North America around 13,000 years ago. This is one reason why the continent was so empty, despite being so verdant, when the Europeans arrived. If this hadn’t happened, they would have had to make many more concessions to the Indian tribes living here and the history of the US might have been very different.
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There’s a binary solar system, consisting of two suns, out there, rotating and twisting through space. If it comes near us, it may shoot out a beam of gamma rays that could eliminate all life on this planet in an instant.

The solar system was first spotted 8 years ago by Australian astronomers. One of the suns is a highly unstable star that is about to explode into a supernova.
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Astronomers have spotted a star that is about to explode?a supernova. Could this ever happen to OUR sun?

In BBC News, Roland Pease reports that astronomers saw the star “RS Ophiuchi? flare up around 6 months ago, suddenly becoming a thousand times brighter than normal. This could mean that, somewhere in the universe, a world like ours is ending. Pease quotes Harvard scientist Jeno Sokoloski as saying, “The explosion is so energetic it actually lifts an envelope of material off the surface of the star and throws it off into space.”

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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