The shivering discovery of cosmic objects that made Earth near “the end of the world”

Many other planets, where 160 light-years away are not as fortunate as Earth, are being “stripped away” of their support class. The team of scientists led by astronomer Ian Bruton of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) discovered another dangerous impact that supernovae can have on similar planets to Earth.

A supernova is a stellar explosion, which occurs when a star dies, releasing countless intense cosmic rays into its surroundings. Those energetic particles can affect nearby planets for hundreds to thousands of years.

As we are 160 light-years away, the Earth-like, but more unfortunate, planets are being blighted by the powerful supernovae around them to damage their atmospheres, which in turn deprives them of their habitability or their catastrophe rather than the life that exists on them.

This result came from observations based on 31 supernovae collected by NASA’s Swift and NuSTAR missions, as well as ESA’s XMM-Newton X ray Observatory (European Space Agency). This new survey showed that it was not only radially affected by living organisms, but also severely altered the chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere.

If the Earth experiences a near explosion, this process could wipe out significant parts of the ozone that protect the life of other cosmic radiation rays that could damage their DNA. This impact was large enough to trigger a mass extinction.

This adds to doubt for earlier findings suggesting that the ancient mass extinction events of the Earth were tied to the time of several supernovae exploding, with the simultaneous death of many plants and animals associated with extra-space-expressing isotopes discovered in tree rings. The latest evidence is certain that supernovae, occurring 2-8 million years ago, 65-500 million light-years from Earth, are relatively distant but show signs associated with minor mass extinctions.

The proof is a hot air bubble called the Local Bubble, which we are lying in, has a low density and is still being expanded, surrounded by a cold air shell about 1,000 light years in diameter. Thankfully, unlike the distant unlucky planets, no supernovae are currently threatening to explode near us, so at least we can be safe in the near future.

(The study has just been published in the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal.)