By Xinhua
Beijing : A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, according to a report in Astrophysical Journal March quoted by media Tuesday.
The blazing spiral could destroy the world from thousands of light-years away, which is far more powerful than the moon-sized Death Star, which has to get close to a planet to blast it as we see in Star Wars.
“I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can’t help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel,” said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
The pinwheel in question, named WR 104, was discovered eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius.
It has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other, one of them highly unstable.
As they circle one another, plumes of streaming gas driven from their surfaces collide in the intervening space, which eventually become entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by the orbits of the stars.
Although the pinwheel can’t blast Earth apart like the Death Star from Star Wars, it could still cause mass extinction or possibly even threaten life as we know it on our planet,
“You’d see extinctions. You might see food chain collapses in the oceans, might see agricultural crises with starvation,” said astrophysicist Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
However, the scientists assuaged people that they need not worry too much.
“There are still plenty of uncertainties – the beam could pass harmlessly to the side if we are not exactly on the axis, and nobody is even sure if stars like WR 104 are capable of producing a fully-fledged gamma-ray burst in the first place,” Tuthill explained.
Future research should focus on whether WR 104 really is pointed at Earth and on better understanding how supernovae produce gamma ray bursts.