How to Die in Space: A Journey Through Dangerous Astrophysical Phenomena

by Paul Sutter

It’s the little things that’ll get ya. Oh yeah, sure, the big things will get you too—Mother Nature has boundless imagination when it comes to devising death traps. But there’s a lot of little things out there too, and they can tear you apart, wear you down, and dissolve your organs just as easily as the big ones. Take, for instance, cosmic rays. You’ll encounter these guys and their friends an uncomfortably frequent amount of times in your adventures, so I’m sure I’ll mention them again—they’re kind of important—but it’s time we dug in and got our hands dirty. I really need you to understand just how little these things care for you and your precious internal organs. They’re called “cosmic,” so they must be in space. They’re called “rays” because the Earth scientists who originally named them thought they were a kind of light, like gamma rays or X-rays (unrelated to stingrays and manta rays, by the way). They were wrong, though. But who isn’t wrong every once in a while? You should know the feeling: for example, you’re wrong when you think you’ll make it out in space. Unfortunately for us, by the time everyone figured out just how wrong they were, the name had stuck. So now we’ve got cosmic rays that aren’t even made of rays. You’ll get over it.1 They are a kind of radiation, though: the kind of radiation that still gives you cancer. We’ll get to that in appropriately gory detail in a little bit.