Most of us didn’t notice that in October 2022 the Earth got its bell rung, a one in 10,000 year event. Three years before, I had written about just such an event.
Earth 1.9 Billion Years Ago
To understand the significance of this event, we must go back 1.9 billion years. Life in the oceans was nothing more than single-cell organisms, simple bacteria. Oxygen levels were extremely low, and the iron-rich oceans were ruddy brown. The ozone layer did not yet exist, so our planet was bathed in harsh ultraviolet radiation.
As the Earth’s bacteria were swimming in their primordial sea, a distant star exploded into a supernova. As occasionally happens, its gaseous remnants collapsed into a black hole. In a cataclysm of violence beyond human imagining, that black hole ejected a 300-second pulse of narrowly confined gamma rays. That burst of highly energetic photons headed into space at light speed, departing the now-dead star in some random direction.
During the ensuing 2 billion years1 after that blast, our solar system made about twenty orbits of the massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Furthermore, the entire galaxy and its nearest neighbors were moving at an incredible 1.34 million miles an hour towards a location in space called The Great Attractor.
Modern Earth
On the ninth of October, 2022, the Earth blundered into the path of that ancient but still massive gamma-ray burst (GRB). During daylight hours, GRB 221009A hit northern Europe dead on. That GRB had enough power to cause a Global Ionospheric Disturbance and wrinkle the Earth’s protective ozone layer.
Energetically, it had orders of magnitude more energy than seen before, earning it the nickname BOAT (Brightest Of All Time.)
The graphic below is found in a NASA article from March 28, 2023. NASA Missions Study What May Be a 1-In-10,000-Year Gamma-ray Burst
Distance
How far away is 2.4 billion light years? The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor, is 2.5 million light years away. So, the GRB source was approximately 1000 times further away.
How do scientists know that? It’s measured from the gamma wave energy’s redshift, which is related to distance by Hubble’s Law and the Hubble Constant.
Atmosphere
Ironically, only three years before the BOAT, I wrote a novel called Atmosphere. That tale featured a deadly GRB that disturbed Earth’s ionosphere and depleted much of the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen.
The following is a quote from the first page.
Four thousand and seventy years ago in a distant part of the Milky Way galaxy, a pair of gravitationally-linked stars began their death spiral, rumbling into a super energetic state that culminated in a gamma-ray burst beamed at light speed into a then-barren region of the Milky Way. In the 21st Century A.D., the Earth was racing at half a million miles per hour towards a cataclysmic collision with the brief but devastating burst of raw energy from that ancient star explosion.
In the city of Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia on the island of Tahiti, children from the local yacht club were on the water with a bevy of single sail dinghies, eight-foot-long training boats with seven-foot sails. Each dingy had room for just one child, so the tiny flotilla of snub-nosed boats was being shepherded by two sailing instructors in a motorboat, busily keeping the students corralled within their marked sailing practice area.
There was a light breeze, ideal conditions for the Optimus training fleet, with enough force to propel the dinghies wherever the sailors commanded, but not strong enough to flip the boats over. The instructors’ coaching could be clearly heard by the young sailors over the slapping of the waves gently jostling each boat.
It was 5:42 in the afternoon of November 23, but the Sun was still high. The Milky Way galaxy lay unseen directly overhead the French Polynesian Windward Islands when a blast from a galactic neighbor, a binary star system in the constellation Sagittarius the Archer, descended like Sagittarius’s arrow directly on top of the luckless Tahitians.
While the students were concentrating on wind and sail, the instructors in their bikini and boardshorts felt a burning sensation over all their exposed skin. Looking up, they saw a sky turning dark orange-brown, a sight never before recorded on Earth. The female guest instructor from California, with blond hair and blue eyes, felt her eyes stinging so severely she could not keep them open.
She shouted to her male counterpart, “I can’t see!”
As he turned away from the darkening sky to look at her, he saw the skin on her face, arms, and thighs were suddenly bright red.
“What the hell happened to you?”
He was Tahitian, and his bronze skin and dark eyes were not as affected as hers, but even at that, he noticed his own arms and legs were burning at the same moment he became aware of the screams coming from the children. They jumped into the water in an attempt to cool their burns. Only one of them, a nine-year-old boy, remained on his boat, convulsed in a seizure.”
Damage
In the story, many living in Tahiti in the French Polynesian Islands were hurt by an intense gamma and X-ray blast from above. The only good news was that the gamma rays struck one of the least populated regions of Earth.
However, those living in high-altitude cities around the world dropped dead shortly after. The effects of oxygen destruction were spread around the world by a perturbed Jetstream. High-altitude cities in China were devastated. Eighteen million died in Mexico. The South American country of Columbia lost 10 million souls, and 150,000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dropped in their tracks.
The damage portrayed in the novel was far greater than observed from GRB 221009A. Still, the GRB in the novel erupted only four thousand light years away, not 2.4 billion light years away. As you might imagine, close cosmic explosions are far more deadly than far-distant ones.
Reassessment and Skeptics
Due to the relative closeness of the story’s GRB, my fictional estimation of damage to Earth may have been a gross underestimate. If you multiply the effect of the BOAT a few billion times, the effects become inestimable. Total global extinction is a real possibility.
Some would have us believe that the odds of any GRB colliding with Earth are incredibly remote. The width of the gamma-ray beam from a nascent black hole is simply too narrow. Furthermore, our planet zips through mostly empty space while orbiting our Sun and galaxy. Simultaneously, it’s rushing at millions of miles an hour towards The Great Attractor.
Critics might protest that a novel about a collision between Earth and an ancient GRB is silly, considering the infinitesimally low odds of a collision.
Well, 2022 proved them wrong. It happened.
Luckily for us, the GRB was not closer.
Coincidence
Of course, it was a coincidence that Atmosphere would be published three years before the strongest measured GRB ever. That timing is nearly miraculous, however, compared to what NASA thought. They suggested it could be 10,000 years before the next GRB is strong enough to ruffle our ionosphere.
I suspect NASA has spent the last three years reconsidering the odds of a GRB recurrence. Or they should. The next one could come sooner than thought and be more severe than heretofore experienced. Perhaps even as severe as I wrote about. Or worse.
But the scary thing is, we won’t know if Earth is about to move in front of a dangerous GRB blast that’s been traveling through space for millennia. We won’t know until it hits. There is no warning.
NASA, could you try to fix that?
Further Reading
Record Broken: NASA Just Saw The Biggest Explosion In The Universe So Far
Bright gamma ray burst confounds models of black hole birth, UC Berkeley News
Boom! Powerful Cosmic Explosion May Hint at How Black Holes Form
We Are Being Pulled by the Great Attractor!
- The location of an event that occurred 1.9 billion years ago is now 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth due to the universe’s expansion over nearly 2 billion years. ↩︎
- Pal, S.; Hobara, Y.; Shvets, A.; Schnoor, P. W.; Hayakawa, M.; and Koloskov, O. First Detection of Global Ionospheric Disturbances Associated with the Most Powerful Gamma Ray Burst GRB221009A. Atmosphere 2023, 14, 217. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14020217 ↩︎
