Wolf-Rayet star aimed right at us!

The spinning wheel is generated by two massive stars, 8000 light years away, circling each other every eight months. Gigantic clouds of gas streaming off the stars are being stretched by the stellar dance into a spiral, much as water spirals from a rotating garden sprinkler.

Eight years ago Dr Tuthill's team, using Hawaii's huge Keck telescope, discovered that one of the objects is a highly unstable beast called a Wolf-Rayet star. They inevitably die in huge explosions that may sometimes produce deadly gamma ray bursts.

Now Dr Tuthill's team has made another discovery. Overlapping 11 time-lapse images of the 30 billion-kilometre-long gas spiral, they have concluded that Earth is almost directly above one pole of the doomed star, dubbed WR 104. When Wolf-Rayet stars explode, much of their energy is blasted from the poles.

"From our vantage point," said Dr Tuthill, "we are looking right down the gun barrel. That's what's got us worried."

Yet another space nasty to worry about. If the ancients were able to predict such things hitting us from space, then that could explain the 2012 end date.

Galaxy fires powerful particle beam

This animation begins with a close-up of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy 3C321. Hot gas falls towards the black hole; some is swallowed but much is ejected in a particle beam. As the camera pans out, the companion galaxy becomes visible as it swings into the path of the jet, which is deflected in the process (Courtesy of NASA/STScI/G Bacon)

You wouldn't want to be in the path of this space nasty:

A jet of hot gas and high-energy particles is shooting out from the core of a galaxy called 3C321 and hitting a neighbou

...Any Earth-like planets that may lie in the path of this beam might be sterilised. If such a jet were aimed at Earth, it would blast the upper atmosphere with gamma radiation. That would destroy the ozone layer in months to years, says Evans, leaving earthlings exposed to carcinogenic ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

More at New Scientist