Something hit Earth from the other side of the galaxy

Fun fact: In December 2004, space telescopes detected something that briefly left them baffled: a gamma-ray flare so bright that, for a fraction of a second, it saturated the sensors of several satellites designed to watch the sky. The source was SGR 1806−20, a magnetar — a neutron star with the most powerful magnetic field known in the universe — located about 50,000 light-years away, on the other side of the galaxy.

What’s most astonishing isn’t just that it was the brightest gamma-ray flare ever recorded, outshining even the most violent solar flares, but that its energy traveled that entire distance and still hit Earth hard enough to disturb the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that reflects radio signals. Radio stations in Hawaii and Antarctica registered changes in their signals because of that event.

And all of this came from an object that would fit within the area of a city, yet contains more mass than the Sun compressed into that tiny space. Proof that the universe doesn’t need to be close to make itself felt.

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