Deadly Cosmic Storms

Mercury, January/February 2006 Table of Contents

Image of SN 1987A courtesy of NASA, P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and B. Sugerman (STScI).

by Jennifer Birriel and Ignacio Birriel

Over the past decade or so, we humans have become nervous about the safety of our planet. In the 1980s we were informed that a collision between Earth and a massive asteroid may well have resulted in the mass extinctions of life that occurred 65 million years ago. By the late 1990s, more and more near-earth objects (NEOs) were found—many passing uncomfortably close, in the astronomical sense anyway.

Hollywood capitalized on these fears and produced two blockbuster doomsday movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, with Earth-striking objects as the movies' villans. These days, most everyone seems to take notice of newly discovered objects that wander "too close" and pose such impact threats to us.

Surprisingly, fewer people are aware of the dangers of cosmic radiation. Most everyone has heard about the increased danger to us from solar ultraviolet radiation as we have inadvertently altered the ozone concentrations of our planet's atmosphere. (We're all slathering on more sun block these days!) But astronomers and other scientists are now discovering that even more deadly threats may come from outer space. In fact, the radiation from outside the Solar System may even have resulted in one or more mass extinctions in Earth's past.

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