The astronomy quote of the week comes from Aussie astronomer Peter Tuthill:
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel."
The end could be closer than we thought.
In the March 1st Astrophysical Journal, Tuthill reports on a photogenic binary star system he’s been watching for some time. The dancing duo is a Wolf-Rayet system, which means that one of the stars is dangerously unstable. As in, close to going supernova. The press release calls it a “ticking time bomb.”
For 8 years, Tuthill has believed himself lucky for getting such a nice angle to watch the spiraling star from. Here’s how he describes an image of it (posted on the next page of this post) on his web site:
A sequence of 11 sharp frames show the elegant spiral nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius to be rotating in a circle every 8 months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock. In the image to the left [follow the jump to the next page to see it], we have rotated the camera frame of each of the 11 images so as to follow the motion, and as a result we can stack all our images into a single false-colour composite.
But Tuthill’s stellar view of the star could be bad news for Spaceship Earth.
In order to see such a perfect spiral, he says, we have to be looking straight down on the axis of the spinning system. And if we’re truly looking straight down on the axis, then when the star goes supernova and emits a jet of lethal gamma rays, we’ll be perfectly poised to get the brunt of the blast.
Sure, sure, it’s 8000 light years away, and maybe its gamma ray burst will fizzle out before it finds us. On the other hand, as Charlie Petit points out over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:
What if it blew 7,999 years ago and the electromagnetic blast wave is ALMOST HERE!!??? Dunno what that’d look like in a telescope, but if you’re watching the monitor and suddenly the CCD image goes white and saturates…maybe don’t go outside
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