Okay, so we're not going to die just yet. But now that I have your attention, let me explain. An explosion 7.5 billion light years away, (halfway across the visible universe) took place the other day, and According to NASA, "never before has anything so far away come close to the naked-eye visibly."
The explosion was that of a gamma ray burst which occurs when a star essentially runs out of fuel and, according to theory, begins the transformation into a black hole.
The fact that this gamma ray burst could be seen with the naked eye is a testament to its ridiculous power when you consider that next "closest" object we're able to see with our naked eyes is a spiral galaxy called M33. The galaxy is far away by Earthly standards, but it is nearby on a cosmic distant scale. The light from M33 takes 2,900,000 (2.9 million) years to reach Earth.
In comparision, this gamma-ray burst was 7.5 billion light years away (thousands of times father away than M33) yet was still able to be detected by the naked eye. Since this explosion took place 7.5 billion light years away and we are just now seeing it, that means the light from the burst had to travel for 7.5 billion years before reaching our eyes. So even though we are just seeing this explosion, we are, in reality getting a glimpse into the past. To add to that mindfuck, our Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old; which means that what was witnessed on March 19th, happened before this planet was here. Argh? That's a different blog though.
It's a good thing that it is so far away, too. Nasa hypothesized that a ten-second burst of gamma rays from a massive star explosion within 6,000 light years from Earth could have triggered a mass extinction hundreds of millions of years ago.
"Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the Universe, and most originate in distant galaxies. A large percentage of bursts likely arise from the explosion of stars over 15 times more massive than our Sun." [source]7.5 billion years for the light from this explosion to reach us? In comparison it takes the Sun's lights only 8 minutes to reach Earth each morning. I don't want to try to calculate how many seconds are in 7.5 billion years. (Okay, I googled it. 7.5 billion years has 2.36676945 x 1017 seconds.) Now how far away (in miles) is this explosion? When you consider that light travels at 186,287 miles per second, and multiply that by all the seconds in 7.5 billion years--there's your answer. Makes me feel a bit safer, though not much less vulnerable.
It really puts into perspective how ridiculously miniscule we are in relation to our behemoth sized universe. Size is relative though. Our universe could be a speck on something greater, and that greater thing a speck on something greater than it, etc, ad infinitum.
"The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing." - Socrates
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