Now I don't want to alarm you...

Now I don't want to alarm you, but there just happens to be a binary star about 8,000 light years from us that's on the brink of exploding. Not a big deal normally, but this one happens to have its pole pointed right at us, which means that if it explodes in a gamma-ray burst it could shoot a beam of destructive, ozone-layer-melting gamma rays at us all Death-Star-like.

There are enough ifs involved in the situation to make the likelihood pretty slim, but this is definitely one of those situations that astronomers are keeping a careful eye on. It all revolves around WR 104, a humungous star classified as a Wolf Rayet star. Generally, these blow up as a supernova, which is no biggie. But sometimes, they blow up as gamma-ray bursts. What's that mean?

Basically what I understand of reading all of this is we might go boom at any point in time since we have no idea when or if this will ever happen. And rather than seeing some incredibly slow impending death, if this happens, the visual will hit at the same time as the gamma rays, meaning we'll die as we see it. Like Hiroshima, but you know, globally. Awesome. It'll be a spectacular event if anyone is sitting on Mars.

..via