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At a distance of 3-12 thousand light years from Earth within of our Galaxy, a collision of large space objects, which was accompanied by a powerful release of energy, able to disable all spacecraft in our orbit the planet. People are lucky because the radiation thrown into space as a result of that disaster, reached the Earth in the Middle Ages. Then, when humanity has not yet flown into space, and not even guessed what had happened. Invisible to the eye, the flash energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, but left traces in the form of beryllium isotopes and carbon. This is exactly what the German scientists, who in their Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society tried to explain the origin of the phenomenon discovered in 2012. A mysterious outbreak became known after Antarctic ice found unusually much radioactive beryllium-10 formed in the atmosphere under the influence of cosmic radiation, and researchers from the Land of the Rising suns encountered high carbon-14 in Japanese cryptomeria (Cryptomeria japonica) from Yakushima island. Specified carbon isotope is formed from nitrogen-14 under the influence of gamma radiation, thus hinting that a powerful burst once reached not only the atmosphere, but also the earth. In 2012 thanks to the attentiveness of a student from the USA a mysterious cosmic phenomenon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Scientists looked at tree rings and determined the time space accident – 774-775 years of our era. Source however radiation still remained a mystery to researchers. Sunny a flash of such power would burn out the ozone layer of the planet. It could be would suggest that a supernova explosion occurred, but for this version not enough evidence (there should have been traces of exposure other types of radiation – x-ray and radio emission). By the opinion of scientists from Germany, the source of this huge release energy could be a collision of black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs. Be it a disaster or, conversely, harmonious merging, this process takes only a few seconds, but releases a tremendous amount of radiation. “We looked spectrum of short gamma-ray bursts to evaluate how much it will be correspond to the observed formation of carbon-14 and beryllium-10, and it turned out to be consistent, ”says Professor Ralph Neuhauser (Ralph Neuhauser) from the Astrophysical Institute and Jena University Observatory. According to the researcher, such gamma-ray bursts are extremely rare. Modern deep space observations suggest that they occur in According to various estimates, the galaxy is once every 10 thousand – 1 million years.
Galaxies
