Fifth Anniversary of a Cosmic Onslaught

The Bad Astronomer writes "Five years ago today (December 27, 2004), a vast wave of high-energy gamma and X-rays washed over the Earth, blinding satellites and partially ionizing the Earth's atmosphere. The culprit was a superflare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20, located 50,000 light years away. The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"

Comments

Re:Five year old news?

[john83]

Someone here has to submit the story to the slashdot servers. Assuming it's accepted immediately, as the standard of editing suggests, someone who sent a page request for the frontpage just after the submission would see the story when the frontpage got back to him. His request for the story then has to be propagated to the server, which has to reply. This means that the server is not more than 1.25 light years away from Earth. Clearly, you must be new here.