Doomsday theorist are predicting that year 2012 will end the earth and it may experience a supernova explosion which will result in pouring the incredible amounts of energy resulting from it which will amount as much as the sun creates during its entire lifetime.
The astronomers say that about one or two supernovae explode each century in our galaxy but they are confident that there is no threatening star close enough to hurt Earth to break its Ozone layer for this the blast must occur less than 50 light-years away and all of the nearby stars capable of going supernova are much farther than this.
Any planet with life on it near a star that goes supernova would indeed experience problems. X- and gamma-ray radiation from the supernova could damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet light in the sun’s rays. The less ozone there is, the more UV light reaches the surface.
At some wavelengths, just a 10 percent increase in ground-level UV can be lethal to some organisms, including phytoplankton near the ocean surface. Because these organisms form the basis of oxygen production on Earth and the marine food chain, any significant disruption to them could cascade into a planet-wide problem.
Another explosive event, called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), is often associated with supernovae. When a massive star collapses on itself or less frequently, when two compact neutron stars collide -- the result is the birth of a black hole.
Astronomers estimate that a gamma-ray burst could affect Earth from up to 10,000 light-years away with each separated by about 15 million years, on average. So far, the closest burst on record, known as GRB 031203, was 1.3 billion light-years away.
As with impacts, our planet likely has already experienced such events over its long history, but there’s no reason to expect a gamma-ray burst in our galaxy to occur in the near future, much less in December 2012.
