[Nateman]

...Too bad about the civilizations nearby that supernova.

The stars that blow up like this tend to die very young. Not enough time for life to evolve for any planets in orbit.

[minnesota_bound]

If we are in the path of a gamma ray burst we would be fried and that could be from stars thousands of light years away or even billions. ________________________ With a magnetic field hundreds of trillions times that of Earth, any living thing would be dead before it got to the magnetar's surface, because the magnetar would have the power to scramble every atom in a person's body. Even at a distance comparable to the half-way point between the Earth and the moon, a magnetar would be able to suck keys out of pockets. https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1998/09/30/distant-star-zapped-us-nasa-says/ _______________________ However, a sufficiently large gamma-ray burst could theoretically strip the planet of its atmosphere and cause a mass extinction event. Indeed, it is widely believes that a gamma-ray burst caused the Ordovician extinction roughly 443 million years ago. these bursts generate as as much energy as our sun will during its entire 10 billion year lifetime. On this recent occasion, the explosive event — now officially dubbed GRB 221009A — traveled roughly 1.9 billion light years to reach Earth https://www.salon.com/2022/10/18/a-gamma-ray-burst--possibly-the-brightest-of-all-time--sweeps-over-earth/