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Supernovae May Explain Mass Extinctions of Marine Animals During Pliocene Era (theregister.co.uk)
"The Register has an article on the possibility that a supernova or a series of them could explain a mass die-off of marine animals around 2.6 million years ago," writes Slashdot reader KindMind. From the report: A gigantic supernova explosion may have triggered mass extinctions for creatures living in Earth's prehistoric oceans some 2.6 million years ago, according to new research published in Astrobiology. Marine animals like the megalodon [...] suddenly disappeared during the late Pliocene. Around the same time, scientists [...] noticed a peak in the iron-60 isotope in ancient seabeds. "As far back as the mid-1990s, people said, "Hey, look for iron-60. It's a telltale because there's no other way for it to get to Earth but from a supernova.' Because iron-60 is radioactive, if it was formed with the Earth it would be long gone by now. So, it had to have been rained down on us" explained Adrian Melott, lead author of the paper and a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Kansas.
The team believes that a supernova located 150 light years away set of a chain of supernovae bursts and covered the Earth in a shroud of deadly cosmic ray radiation. This was amplified, Melott said, because the Solar System is right on the edge of an area of the interstellar medium called the Local Bubble. The Local Bubble extends about 300 light years across and contains the two main clouds of dust and gas: Local Interstellar Cloud and the G-Cloud. As the supernovae ejected cosmic rays, these beams of energetic particles would have repeatedly bounced off the clouds to create a "cosmic-ray bath" that could have lasted 10,000 to 100,000 years. Some of that radiation such as cosmic ray muons would have leaked onto Earth, and over time it could have led to genetic mutations and cancers [that would have caused animals like the megalodon to die off prematurely].
The team believes that a supernova located 150 light years away set of a chain of supernovae bursts and covered the Earth in a shroud of deadly cosmic ray radiation. This was amplified, Melott said, because the Solar System is right on the edge of an area of the interstellar medium called the Local Bubble. The Local Bubble extends about 300 light years across and contains the two main clouds of dust and gas: Local Interstellar Cloud and the G-Cloud. As the supernovae ejected cosmic rays, these beams of energetic particles would have repeatedly bounced off the clouds to create a "cosmic-ray bath" that could have lasted 10,000 to 100,000 years. Some of that radiation such as cosmic ray muons would have leaked onto Earth, and over time it could have led to genetic mutations and cancers [that would have caused animals like the megalodon to die off prematurely].
"these beams of energetic particles would have repeatedly bounced off the clouds to create a "cosmic-ray bath....Some of that radiation such as cosmic ray muons would have leaked onto Earth, and over time it could have led to genetic mutations and cancers."
Can I remind you that particle physics and cosmological physics are not unified fields of science. Muons decay in microseconds, and could never reach earth travelling at C (according to particle physics, not me.).
"The muon (/mjun/; from the Greek letter mu () used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with an electric charge of 1 e and a spin of 1/2, but with a much greater mass. It is classified as a lepton. As is the case with other leptons, the muon is not believed to have any sub-structure—that is, it is not thought to be composed of any simpler particles...Muon decay almost always produces at least three particles, which must include an electron of the same charge as the muon and two neutrinos of different types."
I see a particle that is indivisible, yet breaks down into bigger particles, and a mass derived from those bigger particles. Impossible.
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Can I point out something obvious.
Clearly a muon cannot be *fundamental* and yet *decay* into other fundamental particles. It is interacting with other things you cannot see to create those BIGGER particles.
The core problem with physics:
You have an oscillating dipole, sitting in a resonant field, cancelling it.
Dipole +ve up, field -ve down, result = net ZERO
Dipole zero-crossing, field zero-crossing, result = net ZERO
Dipole -ve up, field +ve down, result = net ZERO
So you cannot see it. You didn't know it was there.
But you can push this dipole with an oscillating field, and it goes shooting off, pow... light from nowhere! All you did was put in energy and out came an electric oscillating wave like thing....
And since all you did was put in energy, you think *all* the parts of that must have come from the energy. The oscillation, the electric charged particles, that make that electric field, all, must have come from the energy.
By magic.
This is the core problem, you've built (insane) models of matter and space based on 2 out of the 3 dimensions.
And all this oscillating MATTER IS RIGHT THERE, but you cannot detect it or see it, and any measurement you try to make with equipment fails because the matter of the equipment resonates with the underlying field cancelling it.
If you stopped your quantum entanglement bullshit, you'd see you already proved the resonance of matter in the entanglement experiment:
Postulate Proof: https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13041516&cid=57791044
Once you realize how it really works, you cannot unsee it.
Electrons don't go from -ve points (muons) to flat discs to the surface of spheres by themselves. They are sitting in a field of oscillating matter.
Protons are not probabilistic smeared over spheres, they are still point charges being fling around that sphere by the matter around them.
Going into denial about it, won't fix anything.
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13041516&cid=57791032
So any evidence of dinosaur cancers, or are we just making shit up now because maybe?
There were no dinosaurs in the Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 mya). The dinosaurs died out roughly 70 million years ago (except for birds).
The supernova hypothesis is not just conjecture. The Scorpius Centaurus star cluster passed close (150 ly) to earth during the Pliocene, and there are remnants of supernovae from about that timeframe. The iron isotopes are more evidence.
There are other explanations for the extinctions. The Isthmus of Panama formed about that time, which changed ocean currents and may have disrupted migration paths. The climate was cooling and the ice caps formed. As the ice caps freeze and thaw they change salinity (creating cold saline water that sinks to the depths with they freeze, and brackish surface water when they thaw), and more extreme thermal gradients, as cold and saline polar "bottom water" settles into the ocean depths. This changes currents and reduces upwelling.
It could have been any of these factors, or some combination of all of them. The Pliocene extinctions were not sudden like the Permian and Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions.
I am curious as to why this would have driven marine animals to extinction without having a similar effect on terrestrial animals. I would want this explained before giving this theory any credence.
If the ocean life got a wallop of cosmic rays, wouldn't the land creatures fare even worse?
Neither the article nor paper's abstract went into it, so I instead have to hypothesize that perhaps the ocean surface micro-organisms were especially sensitive to radiation, leading to an ecological collapse... or maybe the supernovae and extinction events are even unrelated.