Not teasing. Eta Carinae is a "violently unstable" star 150 times as massive (heavy) as the sun.

It's probably not dangerous because it's 10,000 light years away.

But this is something that you could actually see in your lifetime.

Gamma-Bursters are seen roughly 1 per day but that's spread throughout the visible universe! The statisitcal chance of this occuring in our lifetimes, nearby is vanishingly small and may not happen at all any more in our local age of the universe.

Supernovae on the otherhand, are more common but not as bright so we don't see those so far away, but they happen in our galaxy in human history.

One happened in a nearby mini-galaxy (170,000 light years away) in 1987 and in 1054 A.D one formed the Crab Nebula only 6300 LY away.

Then there are magnetars, adolescent neutron stars that give off tremendous bursts of Gamma Rays (weaker and smaller than GRB's) but MUCH closer....

SciAm had an article about them lately....

Magnetars
Some stars are magnetized so intensely that they emit huge bursts of magnetic energy and alter the very nature of the quantum vacuum
By Chryssa Kouveliotou, Robert C. Duncan and Christopher Thompson



On March 5, 1979, several months after dropping probes into the toxic atmosphere of Venus, two Soviet spacecraft, Venera 11 and 12, were drifting through the inner solar system on an elliptical orbit. It had been an uneventful cruise. The radiation readings on board both probes hovered around a nominal 100 counts per second. But at 10:51 a.m. EST, a pulse of gamma radiation hit them. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the radiation level shot above 200,000 counts per second and quickly went off scale.
Eleven seconds later gamma rays swamped the NASA space probe Helios 2, also orbiting the sun. A plane wave front of high-energy radiation was evidently sweeping through the solar system. It soon reached Venus and saturated the Pioneer Venus Orbiter’s detector. Within seconds the gamma rays reached Earth. They flooded detectors on three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Finally, on its way out of the solar system, the wave also blitzed the International Sun-Earth Explorer....continued at the Scientific American Digital