Destroys civilizations. Scientist warns of deadly cosmic ray

MOSCOW, April 30. Gamma-ray bursts could lead to the death of all alien civilizations, said Frederick Walter, professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University, in an interview with the British edition of the Daily Mail.
«It is estimated that gamma-ray bursts occur in all galaxies once every hundred million years or in about a billion years, on average, many (alien) civilizations, if they exist, should perish,” he expressed one of the hypotheses.

According to the scientist, a powerful gamma ray is capable of eliminate all life on about ten percent of all planets in the galaxy.

The publication, in turn, noted that some scientists associate a number of mass extinctions in the history of the Earth with gamma-ray bursts. However, Walter himself advised not to worry about the killing ray. The likelihood of our planet encountering this phenomenon is extremely low.
“They are rare and clearly targeted. And you can’t prepare for them,” the expert noted.

Echo of the explosion of stars

Gamma-ray bursts were discovered in the late 1960s by American military satellites with X-ray and gamma detectors. A few years later the data was declassified. Soviet spacecraft also observed this.

Telescopes see gamma-ray bursts as a very rapid emission of photons, exceeding in power the background values ​​in space and all known sources of energy in the Universe. The flares are an order of magnitude brighter than the total luminosity of the Milky Way, but where they come from is still unknown, although scientists are getting closer to the answer.
For a long time, astronomers believed that gamma-ray bursts were born in our Galaxy. And only two decades later it became clear that they were much further away. Additionally, some arose 13 billion years ago in the early Universe. How strong must the explosion be so that the light does not fade away during such a long journey through outer space? Experts give an explanation: a gamma-ray burst accompanies the appearance of a very massive but compact cosmic object, such as a black hole.

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