Until now, we had only one strong suspect to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs : it was surely an asteroid that wiped out half of life on Earth 65 million years ago. But he also had a mysterious accomplice, as proposed by theoretical physicists Matthew Reece and Lisa Randall.
Waiting to be verified, his theory suggests that a disk of dark matter – a component of the universe that can only be detected by its gravitational effects – cuts the Milky Way in half.
Well, in its wave motion around the center of the galaxy, the Sun would cyclically pass through this fine concentration of invisible matter, which would produce a disturbance of gravity in the Oort cloud – located at the edge of the Solar System – and modify orbit of comets.
Reece and Randall believe that this can happen approximately every 35 million years , when, according to some studies of terrestrial craters, the impact of asteroids on our planet is accentuated. If true, the solar transit through the dark band would play a decisive role in the phenomenon of mass extinctions.
