Astronomers Investigate Whether Dying Star's Blast of Deadly Gamma Radiation Will Hit Earth

For over a decade, a star system on the verge of unleashing a deadly gamma ray burst appeared to have its guns trained on Earth. The so-called "Death Star," which is also famed for looking like a glowing pinwheel, has caused a lot of lost sleep among astronomers. But now they — and the entire planet — may finally breathe a sigh of relief. In a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers at the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i took a closer look at the system, Wolf-Rayet 104, confirming that its unique appearance is the result of its two constituent stars dancing around each other as they each give off a mesmerizing wind of luminous gases. But surprisingly, the astronomers also found that the orientation of the stars' orbits isn't what it was long assumed to be — with the optimistic upshot that, when it does explode, the Earth won't be caught in the crossfire. Hooray! "When I started this project, I thought the main focus would b ... Read full article.