Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs
Hardcover edition
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| Author | Lisa Randall |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Cosmology |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Harper Collins: Ecco Press |
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Publication date
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27 October 2015 (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | (Hardcover) |
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe is a 2015 non-fiction book by Harvard astrophysicist Lisa Randall. Randall conjectures that dark matter may have indirectly led to the extinction of dinosaurs. Other scientists generally regard this as a credible hypothesis but note a lack of supporting evidence. The book itself was well reviewed.
Randall hypothesizes a plane of dark matter exists roughly on the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. As the Sun oscillates in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, it passes through the dark matter. The resulting gravitational disturbances destabilize bodies in the Oort cloud, resulting in increased Earth impacts, such as the one that caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event resulting in the extinction of dinosaurs. Formation of a plane requires that a fraction of the dark matter have different properties than the bulk of it, described by Randall as "dissipative dark matter" in a paper co-authored with Harvard physics professor Matthew Reece. Astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, while noting the idea is interesting, states the evidence is "far from compelling". Astrophysicist Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and physicist Adrian Melott question the statistical analysis used to determine the periodicity of impacts, with Jones also noting impacts could be from asteroids rather than objects originating in the Oort cloud. Physicist Konstantinos Dimopoulos offers that a proposal from a world-renowned cosmologist is certainly credible, but notes the "need to make dark matter weirder than it already is" violates Occam's razor. Additionally, the Nemesis theory, a currently unseen brown dwarf star orbiting the Sun, could also explain periodic impacts. Randall rebuts such criticism by noting that it could be "simpler to say that dark matter is like our matter, in that it's different particles with different forces", adding "the other answer is that the world's complicated, so Occam's razor isn't always the best way to go about things."
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