A Kansas University professor is among a dozen researchers featured in tonight’s “Mega Disasters” program on the History Channel.

The show explores gamma-ray bursts, which are powerful energy explosions from space that last only seconds.

Bruce Lieberman, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the KU Natural History Museum, theorizes that such a burst could have caused the second-greatest mass extinction known in the fossil world. The extinction 450 million years ago eliminated more than 100 families of marine life.

The program, which airs at 9 p.m., also features Brian Thomas, who earned his doctorate in physics at KU in 2005. The gamma-ray episode will be broadcast at various other times Wednesday through Sunday.