4 ms·
Did dark matter do in the dinosaurs?
- Shivetya 12y agoOkay, I have to ask, just how do we test his hypothesis?
- infogulch 12y agoWait 30 million years to cross the galactic disk again? /s Maybe we could find a statistical difference between systems that are passing through the disk now and those that aren't.
- SoftwareMaven 12y agoI think the initial tests would be computer models. Take models of how the earth's core and mantle work (or the Oort cloud) and intersect that with models of how dark matter is spread through the galaxy. Are there inputs where the models behave as predicted, and are the inputs in any way realistic?
- cjubb39 12y agoTime to break out Betteridge's law again?
- tome 12y agotome's law: In any discussion about an article whose title is a question, Betteridge's law is mentioned with probability 1.
- rubyn00bie 12y agoNow that's a good law you got there, tome!
- snowwrestler 12y agoYes--because it's the law.
- cozzyd 12y agoThe idea of disc dark matter is highly speculative, and requires a subdominant dark matter candidate with significant self-interactions (We know that most of the dark matter is in a roughly spherically symmetric halo). Also, the correspondence between disc crossings and cratering looks tenuous at best...someone should check my work, but I plotted the tabulated impact pulses that the author associates with extinction events as a function of phase (assuming period = 30 Myr, t0 = now) at http://imgur.com/dfTkNEW http://imgur.com/dfTkNEW . Running a Rayleigh statistic shows no evidence for non-uniformity (Rayleigh=0.16, N=13) and the mean phase is close to pi/2 too.