A brain-curdling magnetar superflare seen in a neighboring galaxy

As someone who commonly deals in astronomical destruction, I get a lot of people asking me what scares me most about space. Asteroid impacts? Solar flares? Rogue black holes?

Nope. Not even close. The answer is magnetar superflares.

Why? Well, one was seen recently that, during the one-tenth or so of a second it erupted, emitted up to 100 trillion times the energy of the Sun.

!!!!

The event was spotted by NASA's Fermi satellite, which detects gamma rays from space. These are the highest ener...