Deadly Gamma-Rays Can Fry the DNA of Any Living Thing They Encounter, Scientist Warns

Last month, astronomers reported observing the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever recorded, with the exceptionally powerful light seen using Earth-based instruments from a galaxy some five billion light years away.

Alien lifeforms and human space travellers of the distant future beware: being too close to a powerful gamma-ray burst produced by the collision of two neutron stars won’t just kill you –it will fry your DNA, Ohio State University astrophysicist Dr. Paul Sutter has warned.

Short bursts of gamma-ray radiation, resulting from the collision of distant neutron stars (i.e. the collapsed, immensely dense cores of giant stars) are created as beams of matter and energy which is tightly wound up and launched up and away from the stars’ cores, visible “as giant, brief searchlights racing away from the collision.”

“When those searchlights happen to point at Earth, we get a pulse of gamma-rays,” Sutter explained.

Previously, it was believed that because these jets of energy are relatively narrow, and they’re not dangerous to lifeforms if not observed head-on.

In a recent study, Dr. Markus Ahlers and Lea Halser, a pair of astrophysicists from the University of Copenhagen, explored the behaviour of these gas clouds, discovering that occasionally, the clouds collide with one another, producing shockwaves which Sutter noted could then accelerate “and power their own sets of radiation and high-energy particles, known as cosmic rays.”

When combined with other particles, these rays can decay into neutrinos – an extremely small subatomic particle which interacts with weak subatomic forces and gravity.

First observed in the mid-1960s by space-based satellites built to monitor covert nuclear weapons tests on Earth, gamma-ray bursts were first detected by Earth-based observers only in January of this year, when scientists observing the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever recorded. The flash was so powerful that it was thought to have released more energy in the space of mere seconds than our Sun will create over its entire 10-billion-year lifespan. The burst was calculated to have originated some 5 billion light years from Earth.

Sourse: sputniknews.com