Shiva Hypothesis
Encyclopedia
Named after the Hindu god of destruction, the Shiva
Shiva
Shiva is a major Hindu deity, and is the destroyer god or transformer among the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of the primary aspects of the divine. God Shiva is a yogi who has notice of everything that happens in the world and is the main aspect of life. Yet one with great power lives a life of a...

 Hypothesis
is a hypothesis that purports to explain an apparent pattern in mass extinctions caused by impact event
Impact event
An impact event is the collision of a large meteorite, asteroid, comet, or other celestial object with the Earth or another planet. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant...

s.

The hypothesis, created by Michael Rampino of New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, says that gravitational disturbances caused by the Solar System
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

 crossing the plane of the Milky Way
Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...

 galaxy are enough to disturb comets in the Oort cloud
Oort cloud
The Oort cloud , or the Öpik–Oort cloud , is a hypothesized spherical cloud of comets which may lie roughly 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sun. This places the cloud at nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun...

 surrounding the Solar System. This sends comets in towards the inner Solar System, which raises the chance of an impact. According to the hypothesis, this results in the Earth experiencing large impact events about every 30 million years (such as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, formerly named and still commonly referred to as the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago at the end of the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period. It was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant...

).

See also

  • Extinction event
    Extinction event
    An extinction event is a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. They occur when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation...

  • Local Bubble
    Local Bubble
    The Local Bubble is a cavity in the interstellar medium of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. It is at least 300 light years across and has a neutral hydrogen density of about 0.05 atoms per cubic centimetre, or approximately one tenth of the average for the ISM in the Milky Way , and half that for...

  • Nemesis (hypothetical star)
  • Tyche (hypothetical planet)
    Tyche (hypothetical planet)
    Tyche is the nickname given to a hypothetical gas giant planet located in the Solar System's Oort cloud, first proposed in 1999 by astronomer John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Matese and his colleague Daniel Whitmire argue that evidence of Tyche's existence can be seen in a...


External links

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