Related papers: Volcanogenic Dark Matter and Mass Extinctions
A few of the major mass extinctions of paleontology have recently been found to consist of two distinct extinction peaks at higher resolution. A viable explanation for this remains elusive. In this paper it is shown that the recently…
The Lightest Supersymmetric Particle predicted in most of the supersymmetric scenarios is an ideal candidate for the dark matter of cosmology. Their detection is of extreme significance today. Recently there have been intriguing signals of…
Cosmological models with cosmic string and texture seeded universes predict a present abundance of very dense clumps of Cold Dark Matter particles. Their crossing through the solar system would induce a non-negligible amount of radiation…
A nearby supernova (SN) explosion could have negatively influenced life on Earth, maybe even been responsible for mass extinctions. Mass extinction poses a significant extinction of numerous species on Earth, as recorded in the…
Recent observations suggest that many planetary-mass objects may be present in the outer solar system between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. Gravitational perturbations may occasionally bring them into the inner solar system. Their…
In many models, dark matter particles can elastically scatter with nuclei in planets, causing those particles to become gravitationally bound. While the energy expected to be released through the subsequent annihilations of dark matter…
The search for dark matter is one of the crucial open problems in both particle physics and cosmology. If dark matter scatters with Standard Model particles, it could accumulate inside the Earth and begin to annihilate, producing heat…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
The number of active volcanoes and its latitudinal extent is likely to be related to the magnitude of internal heat in rocky planets. A critical value of internal heat may require in these planets to sustain volcanic activity and the…
Macroscopic dark matter like nontopological solitons can form either via the fusion and accumulation of free particles or during cosmological phase transitions. Both mechanisms can create dark matter with large masses ranging from TeV to…
High energy cosmic ray jets from nearby mergers or accretion induced collapse (AIC) of neutron stars (NS) that hit the atmosphere can produce lethal fluxes of atmospheric muons at ground level, underground and underwater, destroy the ozone…
Neutrino masses may arise from spontaneous breaking of ungauged lepton number. Due to quantum gravity effects the associated Goldstone boson - the majoron - will pick up a mass. We determine the lifetime and mass required by cosmic…
The existence of exact solutions which represent a lattice of black holes at a scalar-field-dominated cosmological bounce suggests that black holes could persist through successive eras of a cyclic cosmology. Here we explore some remarkable…
Dark matter (DM) decays and annihilations might heat and partially reionize the Universe at high redshift. Although this effect is not important for the cosmic reionization, the gas heating due to DM particles might affect the structure…
Large-scale volcanism has played a critical role in the long-term habitability of Earth. Contrary to widely held belief, volcanism, rather than impactors, has had the greatest influence on and bears most of the responsibility for…
The astronomical dark matter is an essential component of the Universe and yet its nature is still unresolved. It could be made of neutral and massive elementary particles which are their own antimatter partners. These dark matter species…
Dark matter heating in planets has been proposed as a potential probe for dark matter detection. Assuming near-equilibrium conditions, we find that the energy input from dark matter raises planetary temperatures and accelerates rotation.…
If the temperature of the hot thermal plasma in the Early Universe was within a few orders of magnitude of the Planck scale $M_{\rm Pl}$, then the hoop conjecture predicts the formation of microscopic black holes from particle collisions in…
We propose that the totality of dark matter in the universe might ascribe its origin to one of the key properties of cosmological inflation, that it may be eternal: regions that at the end of the primordial accelerated expansion of the…
If the cosmological dark matter is primarily in the form of an elementary particle which has cross section and mass for self-interaction having a ratio similar to that of ordinary nuclear matter, then seed black holes (formed in stellar…