Beams from brightest gamma ray burst ever seen were pointed directly at Earth The brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected yet, codenamed GRB 221009A, has a strange structure that astronomers have never seen before. On 9 October 2022, high-energy monitoring space satellites detected an extremely bright gamma-ray signal that suddenly exploded from the constellation of Sagitta; it lasted hundreds of …
I'd be more worried about it's affect on meatbags than computers. Anyone know what side of the planet it hit?
Nearby (a few 100 parsecs*) gamma bursts aren't expected to have significant direct effect at ground level(**). Instead they delightfully convert the atmosphere to NOₓ and destroy the ozone layer, so if you survive breathing an atmosphere that turns to nitrous and nitric acid in your lungs, you then can get an exceedingly rapid sun tan unless wearing factor 5,000 sun cream. There is a theory that the Late Ordovician mass extinction (443 Mya) might have been a GRB within our galaxy.
(*) The BOAT being somewhat further away.
(**) Unless stupidly big.
if one reasonably close, had been aimed at us... these things are like nightmares from hell if you read the literature... fortunately they are (as in this case) from other galaxies,,, but they are NOT to be underestimated... one from a nearby galaxy or even a wave over the hedge neighbour, aimed at us, would make lack of computers a thing our dead carcases wouldn't care about
Do not confuse photon energy with radiation intensity. Even a TeV photon has less than say a dropped coffee cup, and fighting through 100 miles of atmosphere is not going to keep its pecker up. You still need an awful lot of them to get above the background radiation down at ground level.
Here's an intriguing account. https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2022/10/17/powerful-gamma-ray-burst-made-currents-flow-in-the-earth/
Note that the peak of the spikes (i.e. nadir of the troughs) is only about 4 dB stronger than the background. To get the power level you probably have to double that to 8 dB. In real money, that's about 4 times the background level (the matching 4s are a coincidence due to the log scale used). And it only lasted for about 1 minute before the Earth's motion swept you past it. Big yawn!
I think you meant a Uranium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator: silvescreenings.com?. >>===========>
The event was so long and intense that it caused sudden Earth global ionospheric disturbances (both day and night) - a result of the increased ionization by X- and gamma-ray emission (Hayes and Gallagher, 2022; Pal et al., 2023) from the VLF/LF sub-ionospheric signals dynamics in the D-region of Earth's ionosphere (~60-100 km).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
