This is the conclusion of the latest study carried out by a team of researchers from New York University (USA) who explain in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society magazine that the movement of our planet around and through the disk of our galaxy could have crucial effects on the fate of the Earth by disturbing the orbits of comets that could cause additional warming in our planetary nucleus, putting on the table the threat of a new mass extinction that is not alien to us.
The galactic disk, that area of the Milky Way in which our Solar System is located, is plagued, in addition to stars and clouds of gas and dust, of that other type of undetectable matter that we know as dark matter. In our passage through the galactic disk, as we move in an undulating way through it, there is a moment – once every 30 million years – that we go directly through the disk . According to the researchers, this moment coincides exactly with periods of intense comet bombardment and with mass extinctions on Earth. In fact, the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago might be the best example of this.
This happens because the dark matter concentrated in the galactic disk, disturbs the trajectories of comets, causing them, instead of orbiting the confines of the solar system, to get dangerously close to Earth, even colliding with us. In addition, each time the Earth passes through the galactic disk, the dark matter particles would accumulate in the Earth’s core, colliding with each other and producing a rise in the temperature in the core, which would cause volcanic eruptions, changes in the level of the Earth. sea or reversals in the magnetic field.
“We are fortunate to live on a planet that is ideal for the development of complex life, but Earth’s history is marked by large-scale extinction events , some of which are also difficult to explain. And it could be that dark matter, whose nature is unknown but which makes up about a quarter of the mass of the Universe, has the answer. Besides being important on a large scale, dark matter can have a direct influence on the Earth ”, explains Michael Rampino, leader of the study.
