Enough with the science!

You're right. You are definitely right. Just one more.

Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, has an amazing post about a gamma ray burst that caught the earth full-on, dead-center this past March. It was the "single most luminous event ever witnessed by humans."

And gamma ray bursts are the baddest beasts in the universe. Thankfully this one happened 7.5 billion light years away.

Had we been much, much closer, like a thousand light years away, the energy from the beam would have torn our atmosphere away, boiled our oceans, and irradiated
the planet with a million times the lethal dose of high-energy gamma and X-rays.

Nice huh? Talk about wrong place at the wrong time. Usually, the chances of being hit by such a narrow beam of energy are pretty low. But we defied the odds on this one. Hit us right in the forehead.

Anyway, Plait's post tells you all you need to know about GRB's so check it out if you're interested.