ALERT: It could happen tomorrow or in 1,000 years or TODAY

FARTHEST

Located 10 billion light-years from Earth.

A Supernova SN1997ff (extremely luminous Type IIn supernova) is the
FARTHEST supernova ever discovered in 1997 during a second observation of
a portion of the northern Hubble Deep Field - a region of the sky which
was looked at previously in 1995 by the Hubble telescope.

The expansion since the Big Bang - began slowing down after the Big Bang
but later it again began to expand about 5-7 billion years ago. Dark
energy was proposed by Albert Einstein's "cosmological constant" in his
theory of relativity to be the repulsive force which is causing expansion
(or stretching) of the universe.

    "The supernova appears to be one of a special class of explosions that
    allows astronomers to understand how the universe's expansion has
    changed over time, much as the way a parent follows a child's growth
    spurts by marking a doorway," Adam Riess of the Space Telescope
    Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland said in a prepared statement.
    (Robin Lloyd, Science Editory - Space.com - April 2, 2001)

BRIGHTEST

NASA reveals images of brightest supernova:
"It's really unlike anything we've ever seen before."

    "The violent explosion was observed by ground-based telescopes as well
    as NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory in a galaxy far from our
    own Milky Way. But the observations hint that an erupting star in our
    own galaxy, called Eta Carinae, could be close to the same kind of
    blast, astronomers say in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical
    Journal." (NASA as reported in NBC News)

The star that blew up was 240 million light-years from Earth, in a galaxy
called NGC 1260.

Using adaptive infra red optics at the Lick Observatory, ANOTHER
Supernovae SN 2006gy, the BRIGHTEST ever was more recently observed in
galaxy NGC 1260.

Typical sightings of which reach their peak brightness in a few days or
weeks and then fade this supernova took over two months to peak and stayed
super luminescent for over three months which was longer than any other
previously observed supernova. It was reported by the Lick Observatory
that it remained as bright as a typical supernova almost 8 months later
and it manifested more brilliance than its host galaxy NGC 1260 about 240
million light-years away.

The mass was estimated by UC Berkeley post-doc fellows Nathan Smith and
David Pooley to be between 100 and 200 times the mass of our sun. This is
a massive star. Our own Milky Way galaxy only contains about a dozen stars
with that much mass out of about 400 billion stars.

    "This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic
    than a typical supernova," said Smith, who led a team of astronomers
    from UC Berkeley and the University of Texas. "That means the star
    that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150
    times that of our sun. We've never seen that before." (Robert Sanders,
    UC Berkeley Press Release - "Largest, brightest supernova discovered"
    May 2007 - http://berkeley.edu/news/)

    "Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex
    Filippenko, UC Berkeley astronomer and leader of the ground-based
    observations at the University of California's Lick Observatory in
    California and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "We were
    astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."
    (ibid)

    "Based on the Lick and Keck observations, plus data from the Chandra
    X-ray Observatory, Smith, Pooley, Filippenko and their colleagues
    argue that the stellar explosion was not your run-of-the-mill
    supernova, but a possible pair-instability supernova." (ibid)

Massive stars produce so much gamma ray radiation in their cores that is
converted to particle and anti-particle pairs. Anti-particles annihilate
particles and there is a drop in radiaion causing the star to collapse
from its own weight. The collapes literally causes a meltdown of and
thermonuclear reaction blowing the star into space, thus resulting in a
supernovae.

The stars with masses which are at least 10X more than our own sun end
their lives as supernovae.

    "Stars with masses at least 10 times greater than our sun end their
    lives after burning hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and on to
    larger elements until they reach iron, when fusion stops. Toward the
    end of this process, the heat produced in the core of the star becomes
    insufficient to support the outer layers, which collapse inward,
    finishing the fusion process and crunching the core to a neutron star
    or black hole. The outer layers of the star are blown off in a bright
    flare-up we observe as a supernova." (ibid)

    "For stars much more massive than this, ranging from 140 solar masses
    to as many as 250, the temperature at the core becomes so great that
    before the fusion cascade is complete, high-energy gamma rays in the
    core start annihilating one another, creating matter-antimatter pairs,
    mostly electron-positron pairs. Since gamma radiation is the energy
    that prevents collapse of the outer layers of the star, once the
    radiation starts disappearing, the outer layers fall inward. The net
    result is a thermonuclear explosion that, theoretically, would be
    brighter than any typical supernova. In this type of supernova, the
    star is blown to smithereens, leaving behind no black hole." (ibid)

In lieu of becoming a black hole they can, like this one, explode and stay
bright for a long time. They also produce heavy elements Most of the
universe's early stars were supermassive and seeded the universe with
their heavy elements which became planets.

    "We may have witnessed a modern-day version of how the first
    generation of the most massive stars ended their lives, when the
    universe was very young," Filippenko said." (ibid)

    "University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby, a UC Berkeley
    alumnus, first observed the supernova on Sept. 18, 2006 in the galaxy
    NGC 1260, located in the constellation Perseus. Filippenko's team
    immediately began observing it with its dedicated supernova search and
    monitor telescope at Lick, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope."
    (ibid)

Spectra of the supernovae was obtained using the Lick 3 meter Shane
telescope and the DEIMOS spectograph which is mounted on the Keck II
telescope. X-ray observations were made by the Chandra X-ray telescope.
NASA manages the Chandra program.

Since its launch on July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been
NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy, taking its place in the fleet
of "Great Observatories." The Chandra observatory is among NASA's fleet of
the "Great Observatories"  and was designed to detect X-ray emissions from
high energy hot regions of the universe with exploding stars, clusters of
galaxies and the matter around black holes.

X-rays are absorbed by the Earth's atomosphere. Chandra launched in July
of 1999 is in orbit about the atmosphere in high earth eliptical orbit at
an altitude of 86,500 miles (139,000 km) is the most sophisticated X-ray
observatory ever built providing pictures 25 times sharper than previous
X-rays. The orbit takes the observatory one third of the way to the moon
and as close as 9,942 miles to the Earth. The time to complete an orbit is
64 hours and 18 minutes.

"...[T]he supernova was 100 times more energetic than usual. Such a
phenomenon would require the violent destruction of a star 150 times more
massive than our sun -- which is near the theoretical limit for a single
star's size." (NASA)

...[T]he observations of SN 2006gy hint that the biggest stars can go off
like giant thermonuclear bombs at the end of their lives...."

    "For all its similarities, Eta Carinae is markedly different from SN
    2006gy in that it's much closer. Eta Carinae is only 7,500 light-years
    from Earth, or about 45 quadrillion miles away -- which may sound like
    a long way in earthly terms, but isn't all that distant for a cosmic
    supernova." (NASA)

It could happen tomorrow or a 1,000 years from now - or maybe today?

    "Astronomers have said a stellar explosion in Earth's celestial
    neighborhood could touch off a mass extinction -- in fact, some
    scientists have proposed that just such a scenario could explain an
    extinction that took place 440 million years ago...." (MSNBC)

ALERT!

There are black hole and gamma rays headed right for us!

The Earth can be swallowed up a black hole.  A black hole travelling in
our Milky Way Galaxy at four times faster than any stars around it, an
event invisible yet there is ample evidence of it's existence. It is also
the result of a Supernova, the death of an exploding star.

This particular Black Hole is about 6,000 light years away and it is
headed this way.

"This is the first black hole found to be moving fast through the
plane of our galaxy," said Felix Mirabel, a researcher at the French
Atomic Energy Commission.

So, how close will it come to the Earth and when. Sometime in the next 230
million years and likely won't be closer than 1,000 light years but know
that there are about a million of these black holes in just our own galaxy
AND there are a lot of exploding stars some of which becoming supernovaes
spewing death rays and heavy matter across the universe.

Super solar flares, exploding stars, astroids and meterors all pose a
possible threat to Earth and this solar system. Nothing is forever!

Hank Roth