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.