Related papers: Volcanogenic Dark Matter and Mass Extinctions
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
The evidence for the dark matter of the hot big bang cosmology is about as good as it gets in natural science. The exploration of its nature is now led by direct and indirect detection experiments, to be complemented by advances in the full…
It is now, generally, believed that the presence of some form of dark matter is essential to explain the flat rotation curves of galaxies, and anomalous large velocities of galaxies in the clusters and superclusters. This dark matter turns…
Dark matter can be captured by celestial objects and accumulate at their centers, forming a core of dark matter that can collapse to a small black hole, provided that the annihilation rate is small or zero. If the nascent black hole is big…
The astronomical dark matter could be made of weakly interacting and massive particles. If so, these species would be abundant inside the Milky Way, where they would continuously annihilate and produce cosmic rays. Those annihilation…
We examine the possibility that a nearby supernova explosion could have caused one or more of the mass extinctions identified by palaeontologists. We discuss the likely rate of such events in the light of the recent identification of…
Dark matter coupled solely gravitationally can be produced through the decay of primordial black holes in the early universe. If the dark matter is lighter than the initial black hole temperature, it could be warm enough to be subject to…
Dark matter (DM) can be captured in celestial bodies after scattering and losing sufficient energy to become gravitationally bound. We derive a general framework that describes the current DM distribution inside celestial objects, which…
Extraterrestrial processes like neutrinos from collapsing stars, cosmic rays from supernovae and cosmic rays from neutron star mergers etc. have recently been proposed as models to explain the periodic mass extinctions such as that which…
We entertain the exotic possibility that dark matter (DM) decays or annihilations taking place in our galaxy may produce a flux of relativistic very weakly-coupled bosons, axions or dark photons. We show that there exist several upper…
Clumped dark matter arises naturally within the framwork of generic cosmological dark matter models. Invoking the existence of dark matter clumps can also solve may unexplained mysteries in astrophysics and geology or geophysics, eg. the…
Cosmologists have long wondered whether the Universe will eventually re-collapse and end with a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming increasingly cold and empty. Recent evidence for a flat Universe, possibly with a cosmological constant…
Fragile volatile aggregates with extremely low albedo, gravitationally drawn into the solar system are likely from the dark matter dominating the universal mass. Characteristics of this meteoric population permitted avoiding detection…
The origin of dark matter in the universe may be scalar particles produced by amplification of quantum fluctuations during a period of dilaton-driven inflation. We show, for the first time, that a single species of particles, depending on…
Dark Matter (DM) can become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and hence increase the heat flow in exoplanets and brown dwarfs. Detecting such a DM-induced heating in a population of exoplanets in the inner kpc of the Milky Way thus…
We estimate dark matter density for the Universe with a reheating temperature smaller than the mass of dark matter, assuming dark matter to be a weakly interacting massive particle. During the reheating process, an inflaton decays and…
We propose a simple model in which the cosmological dark matter consists of particles whose mass increases with the scale factor of the universe. The particle mass is generated by the expectation value of a scalar field which does not have…
Recent evidence quite convincingly indicates that the Late Permian biotic crisis was in fact a binary extinction with a distinct end-Guadalupian extinction pulse preceding the major terminal end-Permian Tartarian event by 5 million years.…
We suggest that accretion of planet-bound dark matter by the Jovian planets, and by hot-Jupiter exoplanets, could be a significant source of their internal heat. The anomalously low internal heat of Uranus would then be explained if the…
An initial state for the observable universe consisting of a finite region with a large vacuum energy will break-up due to near horizon quantum critical fluctuations. This will lead to a Friedmann-like early universe consisting of an…