(ORDO NEWS) — Since the discovery of giant ancient dinosaurs, scientists have been looking for an answer to the question: what made them disappear?
Most scientists believe they were destroyed by an asteroid impact. There is also a theory that a series of volcanic eruptions left the planet without oxygen, making it uninhabitable for these giants.
But there are more incredible theories, such as one physicist who suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs could have been caused by something much more fundamental, such as a change in physics.
It all comes down to the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding. To calculate the expansion rate of the universe, we can measure the distance and speed of nearby galaxies, quasars, and supernovae.
Another way to measure the rate of expansion is to look at the cosmic microwave background, which shows us the rate of expansion in the early universe, before extrapolating to today.
The expansion of the universe seems to be going faster and faster, and aside from some error we haven’t noticed yet, this discrepancy must be explained by new theories like dark energy.
Professor Leandros Perivolaropoulos of the University of Ioannina (Greece) has a theory that he believes eliminates the discrepancies in the expansion rates obtained with each method of measurement and, in addition, destroys the dinosaurs to boot.
In an article published on the Arxiv server titled “Is the Hubble crisis related to the extinction of the dinosaurs?”, Perivolaropoulos suggests that a 10% increase in gravity took place over 100 million years, and ended 50 million years ago.
The paper suggests that a 10 percent increase in gravity could have shattered the Oort cloud, which is made up of billions of icy objects at the outer edges of our solar system, and then blasted all of those objects toward us at great speed. In his opinion, you can see something in the geological history of the planet.
He further writes that “the impact flow of kilometer-sized objects has at least doubled over the past 100 million years compared to the long-term average.”
Perivolaropoulos himself is aware that there is not enough evidence to support this theory, but he believes that there are certainly ways to confirm or refute it.
“Earth‘s temperature is highly dependent on the magnitude of [gravity], as is solar brightness,” he concludes.
“Thus, an increase [in gravity] would lead to a similar increase in the temperature of the Earth.
Thus, a careful search for unaccounted for changes in the Earth’s temperature over the past 150 million years can either impose serious restrictions on the hypothesis of a gravitational transition, or reveal possible signs of such an event.
The scientist believes that if we carefully study the rotation of galaxies, then we could get clues as to whether the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid thrown in our direction, due to a fundamental change in gravity in our universe.
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