Linking Mass Extinctions To the Sun's Journey In the Milky Way

schwit1 writes "In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint service, astronomers propose that as many as eleven past extinction events can be linked to the Sun's passage through the spiral arms of the Milky Way. (You can download the paper here [pdf].) From the paper: 'A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy's various spiral arms.'"

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Re:suuuure

[icebike]

in other news...many people die in hospitals, therefore hospitals may cause death.

And indeed they do.

http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital-acquired_infection

So don't be so quick to dismiss the possibility of causation, simply because it was discovered by correlation.
Falsely assuming no-causation is every bit as much as a statistics induced error as falsely assuming causation.

With correlation you have a reason to look for causation. Without correlation, looking for causation is just shooting in the dark.