Could Earth's Atmosphere Survive a Close Gamma Ray Burst?

[Dinoduck94]

TL;DR Summary

Is there a band width more powerful than Gamma?

I'm watching an episode of "How the universe works" and they explained the nightmare scenario where a star supernovas and turns into a black hole, emitting such a powerful burst of gamma rays, that if it were any closer than 6000 light years then it would be capable of stripping the entire Earth of its atmosphere.
My question... if an energy burst traveled 6000 light years, and was STILL powerful gamma radiation; what was it when it started it's journey?
The waveform must have stretched out over it's journey, meaning for it to still be gamma after 6000 light years, it must have been one powerful burst of energy! Is there a band width above gamma, or would it still be classified as "gamma" regardless of it being on a completely different level?

 

[Ibix]

There's no redshift (stretching of wavelengths) over only 6000 ly. That kind of thing is non-existent below distances of hundreds of millions of light years. Our galaxy alone is over a 100,000 ly across. 6,000 ly isn't quite next door, but it's not even the other side of town on cosmological scales.

To answer your question anyway, gamma radiation is the name for electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength less than a hundredth of a nanometer, or thereabouts. So there's no name for anything higher. It'd only be a name anyway - electromagnetic radiation is electromagnetic radiation. The names are just a human convenience.

I feel I should note that total energy isn't directly related to the frequency of radiation, although the energy of individual photons is. The kind of catastrophic event that emits huge amounts of energy would be equally destructive (possibly more so) if they emitted at longer wavelengths - it's just that they tend to emit in short wavelengths because they are so hot.