We should all feel very lucky that our local galactic neighborhood doesn't contain anything big enough to produce something along the lines of GRB 080319B, a gamma ray burst so large that even at 7.5 billion light years away, it was "the single most luminous event ever witnessed by humans", visible (for a short time at least) to the naked eye.
Think about this for a second. Something putting out so much energy that even from half way across the known universe, you could have seen it with your naked eye. Fortunately, GRB 080319B was more than far enough away that instead of being instantly lethal to everything on the planet, it's just really freaking cool.
We now return you to waiting for imminent death by LHC, coming to you live on October 21st.
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