Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

The secret project, innocuously titled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' was never carried out.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Convinced that the Soviets had the same idea, the U.S then developed the Vela program, comprised of 12 satellites designed to detect nuclear tests in deep space. By 1963 nuclear test ban treaties in theory prevented such activities on Earth.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

On July 2, 1967 the Vela 4 and Vela 3 satellites detected a flash of gamma radiation unlike any known nuclear weapons signature.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

As more satellites were launched with better instruments, the Los Alamos team continued to find inexplicable gamma-ray bursts in their data.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

These were so intense that the presumption was they must be nearby.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Pentagon believed this was evidence that the Soviets had established a base on the far side of the moon in order to carry out secret atom bomb tests.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

A similar idea involving Nazis more recently formed the plot of the spoof movie Iron Sky...

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

...and frequent claims are made by UFOlogists of alien bases there to this day...

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But the sheer number of detected gamma ray bursts indicated a scale of cosmic event of far greater magnitude than a mere nuclear explosion.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Scientists assumed they must be coming from within our own galaxy.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But try as they might, they could never find a source in the direction from which any given burst emerged.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Furthermore, the bursts were not clustered along the plane of the galaxy where stars are densest, but randomly across the sky.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

For many years, scientists who dared to suggest an extra-galactic source were ridiculed.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

If they were right, then each burst would expel more energy in 20 seconds than our own sun in ten billion years. They would be the most powerful source of energy in the Universe. Anything directly in their path would die.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Eventually a small Dutch-Italian satellite called BeppoSAX was able to pinpoint the position of gamma-ray bursts.

 

They were indeed coming from beyond our galaxy. So far away in fact that they take us back to the very dawn of the Universe, 13 billion years ago.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

What causes them? There are conflicting theories. None so far have been proven.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a gamma-ray burst might have caused the Ordovician extinction 450 million years ago, some 200 million years before dinosaurs evolved.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's protective ozone layer.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Recovery could take at least five years. With the ozone layer damaged, harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun would kill smaller life-forms and disrupt the food chain.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

A team of scientists has determined that Earth was hit by a gamma ray burst in AD 775. The researchers analysed the tree rings of ancient cedar trees in Japan that contained unusual levels of radioactive carbon-14, as well as spikes of beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice. These kinds of radioactive isotopes are created when intense radiation hits atoms in the upper atmosphere of our planet. Had the radiation been of comparable amplitude such as theorized for the Ordovician extinction, all life on Earth would now likely be extinct.

 

"We considered from the energy what would be the distance given the energy observed. Our conclusion was it was 3,000 to 12,000 light-years away — and this is within our galaxy.”