It is believed that the death of the dinosaurs happened 65 million years ago, and it was more likely caused by a comet or large asteroid that clashed with our planet. But taking into consideration that asteroids don’t fall that often, this particular hypothesis has been very controversial this whole time.
Today, many scientists believe that the increasing amount of comеts was no coincidence at all.
American cosmologist, Lisa Randall, explains in her recently published book that a large disk of dark matter – invisible matter, which is 5 times more than “normal” matter – is actually the reason for the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
She explains that when the disk passed near our Solar system, it could have caused disturbances in space, resulting in vibration of the gravitational forces – and that could have resulted in the flinging of comets from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort cloud into the Solar system and could have directed them towards the Earth.
Astrophysics and cosmology testify that dark matter in our galaxy and the Universe is much more than common matter. Despite the fact that it is invisible, scientists can follow it through the gravitational pull, which it applies to nearby objects.
Randall believes that there is a whole disk of dark matter in our galaxy. In order to have any kind of effect on us, it must correlate with the visible disk of the Milky Way. The Solar System oscillates around it with its journey around the center of the galaxy. But that is a little tough to prove since scientists are unable to explain the observations made until now.
Cosmologists believe that dark matter will form a large spherical halo, rather than a disk around galaxies. Even if that is a fact, there is no reason for the dark disk to be in synchronization with the visible disk of the Milky Way.
Randall is a renowned cosmologist and her idea definitely deserves attention. If the model isn’t in conflict with future observations, the cosmologist believes that a possibility exists where the result would be an increasing amount of comets and asteroids. Randall claims that the amount of comets increases every 35 million years, meaning that mass extinctions happen in cycles.
Actually, there is another suggestion explaining the possible reason for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. It has to do with the mysterious companion star of the Sun, called Nemesis the existence of which is yet to be proven. Nemesis appears as a hypothetical, red or brown dwarf orbiting the Sun and 1.5 light years away from Earth.
Every 25 million years or so, this star moves closer to the Sun and the gravitational interaction leads to high comet activity. This is an unverifiable hypothesis since such brown dwarfs, similar to the Nemesis star, have not been observed in our Solar system.
