Five years ago, something quite scientifically interesting happened.

We survived a deadly gamma ray burst. Remember our discussions of gamma rays and how they are a high frequency, high energy radiation far on one end of the electromagnetic spectrum (yes, that will help you on the exam)?

Fascinating:

December 27, 2004: The Day Earth Survived the Greatest Stellar Attack -Ever: “For a brief instant, a couple of tenths of a second, on December 27, 2004 an invisible burst of energy the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight shone on Earth. Many orbiting satellites electronics were zapped and the Earth’s upper atmosphere was amazingly ionized from a massive hit of gamma ray energy.”

Fantastic. Go read the rest of the article to see what else happened.

Yay science!