>The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours.
For a gamma ray burst from an object that's 2.4 billion light years away, that seems pretty worrying. If it had been in our galaxy (50k light years across, so about 50,000 times closer) I'd assume the consequences would be serious indeed.
For a gamma ray burst from an object that's 2.4 billion light years away, that seems pretty worrying. If it had been in our galaxy (50k light years across, so about 50,000 times closer) I'd assume the consequences would be serious indeed.