WR 104 is an interesting system. Both stars are guaranteed to explode one day. If they are just regular old supernovae, then we are in no danger at all, because they are way way too far away to hurt us (a regular supernova has to be about 25 light years or closer to hurt us, and WR 104 is 300 times farther away than that). It is possible that one of the stars may explode as a GRB, and it’s possible it’s aimed at us, but we don’t know. And we don’t know exactly what effects it would have on us. So if it’s less than 10,000 years from exploding and if it blows up as a GRB and if it’s aimed at us and if there isn’t much junk between us and it, then yeah, we may have a problem. But that’s an awful lot of ifs.

This is an aside to your last comment. I observe at Fremont Peak Observatory, just south of San Juan Bautista, CA. It has been chosen as a site for a camera installation by Dr. Peter Jenniskens for a set of his all-sky cameras.

I was speaking with him this past Saturday, and he believes that many of the smaller bodies currently identified as 'asteroids' are actually expended comets.

His project is an attempt to backtrace the dust clouds that form meteor showers and see if a parent body can be identified for each one, and also to verify some of the ~240 claimed but unverified meteor showers.

It is not a comet, its an astroid. Very different things.

I looked at the site, and the best thing I can say about it is that it is well laid out. As far as the actual content, there's nothing there we haven't already addressed. There's the typical mix of partial truths and outrageous lies, the blanket statements with no support, and the unanswered rhetorical questions.

Nothing new here.

You are very correct. I enjoy reading things about science, as I always have. I never really had the time or energy to take matters into my own hands and learn about astronomy or physics…but I do enjoy occasionally finding out new advances in technology. Recently though, everytime I start reading…the comments sections are usually swarmed with doomsayers.

GreatJuJu,

Thank you for addressing some of that. In particular, it was claiming that ancients had superior knowledge of past extinctions or something. I don't have a very skeptical mind (unfortunately), so when I stumble upon a site like that…I close out of it asap. But that just leaves me wondering what they had to say and if there is any truth to it. Thats why I like to ask skepticons (yeah, skepticons…) like yourself before I get freaked out.

The earth's magnetic field always has "holes" in it. NASA's THEMIS project discovered a larger-than-expected hole in 2007 that was bizarrely triggered by a flare with northern polarity. Two things to keep in mind:

1) The hullabaloo over this discovery occurred prior to the revising of the Solar Max 24 prediction in May 2009. People were still expecting a nasty Solar Maximum in 2011 or 2012.

2) Direct studies of Sun-Earth electromagnetic dynamics, such as those enabled by SOHO and STEREO, have not been possible for very long. Just as detailed earthquake records go back only a century at most, not allowing us to derive any particularly telling trends over geologic time scales, solar observations such as those we can conduct now are still in their youth and operate from a very limited sample of data.

As always, a strong CME can potentially cause problems for communications and power grids on Earth at any given time, and the state of the planet's geomagnetic field at that moment can certainly influence how severe a storm is or whether there is a storm at all. This is true during solar minimums and maximums alike, day in and day out.

I accidently came across this link from the discover blog comments. It was posted in the blog about Earth's magnetic field having holes in it and could cause problems during the solar max. Of course, there were people there discussing 2012. Can one of the debunkers look through the site and let me know if there is anything that stands out on this page? Is it another laughable site? These things worry me to death, and I know you guys do a great job of pointing out the wrong things…

Thanks again