Houston, we have a problem. Those immortal words, or in fact, exceptionally mortal words, bearing in mind where the problem occurred, were uttered by the astronaut Tom Hanks, way up in space in Apollo 13. Hanks survived to make a series of gushy rom-coms so all ended well there.

But space is not a place for a problem. And we (that is ‘we’ the planet, the solar system, the galaxy) have a bit of a problem.

A neighbouring star system is dying, as do all stars eventually. And there’s 2 ways for this to go. (There’s probably a thousand variations, but in my mind which craves simplicity, which yearns to create systems from the chaos, there’s just 2). It can either crush itself to death and become a ‘black hole’ or it can turn itself into a Wolf-Rayet star and eventually explode.

I like black holes. They’re neat, simple. The gravity in the star pulls itself inwards until that gravity becomes so strong that the actual atoms collapse into themselves. And if you remember ‘pictures’ of atoms, they’re vast spaces with a few tiny particles whizzing round, joined by elliptical lines. Well take away the spaces, (and the lines, cos, like, you know they were never really there, don’t you?) and you end up with the same mass in a microscopic space. Infinitely dense, they call it, like a lot of football fans. A ‘singularity’. Possibly like the one that started the ‘big bang’.

Anyway, the other option is this Wolf-Rayet thing. And here the star burns itself to death, eating up all its own mass from the outside in and finally explodes. But during the process it creates solar winds of 12 million kph. You wouldn’t want to put an umbrella up in that. But best of all, as the star explodes it releases gamma ray bursts. Ooohhh, gamma ray bursts!!!

And they’re fucking awesome. They release as much energy in a 2/3 second burst as our sun produces in its entire lifetime. And without a calculator, I can tell precisely that THAT IS A FUCK OF A LOT OF ENERGY!!!! And would be sufficient to strip our weeny little planet of its atmosphere, even from 8,000 light years away where this is currently happening. So have your roof tiles checked as soon as possible.

But they didn’t say whether this is a ‘now’ problem or an 8000 years time problem. Which I reckon is rather significant. I need to book a holiday.

It’s not very neighbourly to explode so close to other people. Rather rude. I might call the council.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx