Cool, I thought, scientists may get a good luck at a supernova.
Then I read this paragraph:
Listen, I’m all in favor of a good fireworks show, but not so much with the losing of the atmosphere and the radiation bath, and the dying and the screaming and the hurn.
Bad enough we have to worry about meteors smacking into home base, now we have to fret over supernovae in our own galaxy. How the hell have we survived this long?
The hurn? ANYTHING but the hurn!!
What the hell is a hurn? 
Sorry, a Jerry Lewis reference sounded appropriate for a freak-out of this nature. Mebbe I should have said “gafloigle.”
Don’t sweat it . . . First of all, GRBs are fairly rare, and the odds of one occuring in our Galaxy any time soon are quite low. Even if one does occur in the Milky Way, we’d have to be in the beam of the gamma-ray burst to get really really cooked.
Yep, if we’re talkin’ death from the skies, my money’s still on asteroids or comets.
Could be worse.
Thought I saw a Vogon Constructor Ship in the sky last night.
The I realized it was just an SEP
If only Effrafax of Wug had had one of them.
With the dying and the screaming and the glayvin!
That’s the word I wanted.
Start sweating. Betelgeuse (aka Alpha Orionis) is heading towards a supernova “soon”. Of course in astronomical terms soon could be tomorrow or it could be 50000 years from now.
And Betelgeuse isn’t 440,000,000 light years away. It isn’t 1,000,000 light years away. It isn’t even 1000 light years away. It is in fact 427 light years away. When it goes bang, we’re going to notice.
Ah, Beetlejuice, always causing trouble aren’t you ?
Guess I better start packing.
Darn it! I was going to make a crack about Vogons! Now I only have those wimpy crop circle aliens to work with.
Ya ever see one of those movies on the Late Late Show that ends with Nuclear Armageddon? They turn off the soundtrack for that part of the movie, to simulate what a Planet Earth with no life left on its surface would sound like. So you turn up your TV, but you still can’t hear anything, so you turn it up all the way, and the only thing you can hear is the hum of the audio amplifier in your TV set.
That’s the hum.
And then they cut to a commercial of some fat guy shouting about how he can sell you a new sofa for the change in the cushions of your old one, only it’s EALLY LOUD because you still have your TV turned up all the way, and it wakes up the baby, and the dog, and your wife, who shouts at you to turn off the f*cking TV and come to bed.
Anyway, that hum.
Okay, where can one aim their telescope, and will the Hubble be catching any of this? This is a must see.
Yeah, but does it’s axis if rotation point towards us? I’d think that would be pretty unlikely.
ParentalAdvisory, you can read a little bit more about it here. Note that space.com describes it somewhat differently from the Sun, but the catalog number (GRB 060218) is the same, so it’s the same event they’re talking about.
You guys joke, but think about the poor people living on a planet revolving around that star! They’re all going to die! And we will never know anything about them! Won’t someone think of the aliens???
The article, I think, is a bit remiss in using the term “supernova.” This is outside my specialty and is a rapidly advancing field, but inasmuch as we understand GRBs at all, I thought they were beleived to originate in hypernovae. Hypernovae only occur (if they actually occur in the way current models suggest) in supermassive stars. The nearest star to Earth that could potentially go hypernoa is Eta Carinae. It is a violently variable star, implying that whatever it’s going to do, it’s going to do it relatively soon. Because it’s such an oddball star, we cannot determine its size and distance precisely but its mass is 100-150 times the mass of the Sun, and 7500-10,000 ly away–too far to destroy life on Earth if it goes hypernova, but it might have some adverse effects on us.
Betelgeuse has up to 20 times the mass of the Sun, and is going to be a garden-variety Type II supernova; a pretty show, for sure, but at 430 (+/- 100) ly away, unlikely to have a significant effect on Earth.
It’s the only way to stop the horrible planet of the apes. What must be done must be done.
Don’t worry. Their top scientist put his only son in a space ship aimed at Earth before the star went boom.