edit – history – watch – refresh
this might sound stupid, but if the star is 8000 light-years away, and a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, would it not take 8000 years before it was a danger to us.
Yes, except for the fact that it may have blown 7,999 years ago, and we wouldnt know it until the gamma ray wavefront hit the Earth. Our failure to have noticed WR104 sooner in no way obligates it to blow at some point in our distant future.
Astronomers do not have sufficient instrumentation or understanding, as yet, to characterize the late end-stage behavior of stars, immediately prior to supernova. They've never been looking at one just before it blew, and have nothing to compare WR104 to. Current models can only place WR104 in its last 100,000 years of life. The data obtained on it so far consists of a handful of snapshots, taken weeks apart, at a limited selection of wavelengths. Given that a WR104 GRB represents a potential "Extinction Level Event", its important that more be done to observe and characterize its behavior, as soon as possible.
