Mercury,
January/February 2006 Table of Contents
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Image
of SN 1987A courtesy of NASA, P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics) and B. Sugerman (STScI). |
by
Jennifer Birriel and Ignacio Birriel
Over the past
decade or so, we humans have become nervous about the safety of
our planet. In the 1980s we were informed that a collision between
Earth and a massive asteroid may well have resulted in the mass
extinctions of life that occurred 65 million years ago. By the late
1990s, more and more near-earth objects (NEOs) were found—many
passing uncomfortably close, in the astronomical sense anyway.
Hollywood
capitalized on these fears and produced two blockbuster doomsday
movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, with Earth-striking
objects as the movies' villans. These days, most everyone seems
to take notice of newly discovered objects that wander "too
close" and pose such impact threats to us.
Surprisingly,
fewer people are aware of the dangers of cosmic radiation. Most
everyone has heard about the increased danger to us from solar ultraviolet
radiation as we have inadvertently altered the ozone concentrations
of our planet's atmosphere. (We're all slathering on more sun block
these days!) But astronomers and other scientists are now discovering
that even more deadly threats may come from outer space. In fact,
the radiation from outside the Solar System may even have resulted
in one or more mass extinctions in Earth's past.
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