Sometimes when a star collapses into a supernova, it releases an intense, narrow beam of gamma rays. Gamma-ray bursts often last just a few seconds, but during that time they can release as much energy as the Sun will produce in its entire lifetime, making gamma-ray bursts the most powerful explosions ever observed in the universe. They are so intense that, if pointed at the Earth from even the most distant edge of our galaxy, they could easily cause a mass extinction, possibly obliterating all life on the planet. It's thought that a gamma-ray burst may have caused the Ordovician extinction around 440 million years ago, which wiped out 85% of all species at the time.
Clearly, the farther away a planet is from gamma-ray bursts, the better its chances of harboring advanced forms of life. In a new paper, scientists have shown that the gamma-ray burst risk to life favors a universe where all objects (like planets and gamma-ray bursts) are relatively far apart. And the main factor that tells how far apart everything is in the universe—or in other words, how things are spreading out and moving away from each other—is dark energy or the cosmological constant.
One of the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology is why does the cosmological constant have the particular value that scientists observe? Einstein initially devised the cosmological constant to be like an "anti-gravity" force, so that a larger value means that the universe is expanding very rapidly and objects are being pushed farther apart from each other. A smaller value means that the universe itself is smaller and objects are somewhat closer together.
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