If we take a planet like Earth, the X-ray wave striking its atmosphere would produce a torrent of charged particles and disrupt the ozone layer. Without ozone layer protection, ultraviolet rays from the host star could have an adverse impact on the planet’s life forms and lead to an extinction-scale event. With continued radiation exposure, the atmosphere will produce a brown haze composed of nitrogen dioxide that will also gradually wipe away the greenery.
A major takeaway from the research is that it alters our understanding of the time that it takes for a supernova explosion to have an impact on nearby planets. The official research release published by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explains, “If the supernova’s blast wave strikes dense surrounding gas, it can produce a particularly large dose of X-rays that arrives months to years after the explosion and may last for decades.”
In the past, scientists have focused on the immediate and long-term impacts of a stellar explosion. The first wave of radiation flood engulfs a nearby planet within days to months after the cataclysmic event, while the energetic cosmic particles can take hundreds of thousands of years to hit a planet. The Earth is currently not in danger of such a star-catalyzed apocalypse because there is no such supernova happening in proximity within the X-ray spectrum, but there are signs that a supernova explosion happening some 2 to 8 million years ago had an impact on element formation brewing on our planet.
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