Related papers: Anoxia duirng the Late Permian Binary Mass Extinct…
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 passage of the Earth through dense clumps of dark matter, the presence of which are predicted by certain cosmologies, would produce large quantities of heat in the interior of this planet through the capture and subsequent annihilation…
The long standing anomaly in the positron flux as measured by the PAMELA and AMS-02 experiments could potentially be explained by dark matter (DM) annihilations. This scenario typically requires a large "boost factor" to be consistent with…
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…
We have identified iridium in an ~5 m-thick section of pelagic sediment cored in the deep sea floor at Site 886C, in addition to a distinct spike in iridium at the K-Pg boundary related to the Chicxulub asteroid impact. We distinguish the…
The end-Permian mass extinction is the most severe known from the fossil record. The most likely cause is massive volcanic activity associated with the formation of the Permo-Triassic Siberian flood basalts. A proposed mechanism for…
The 27 Myr periodicity in the fossil extinction record has been confirmed in modern data bases dating back 500 Myr, which is twice the time interval of the original analysis from thirty years ago. The surprising regularity of this period…
Microlensed double-image quasars have sent a consistent message that the baryonic dark matter consists of a population of free-roaming planet mass objects, as summarized previously. These were previously predicted to have formed at the time…
The terrestrial fossil record shows that the exponential rise in biodiversity since the Precambrian period has been punctuated by large extinctions, at intervals of 40 to 140 Myr. These mass extinctions represent extremes over a background…
The latest Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data severely constrain the conventional warm dark matter solution to small-scale issues in the cold dark matter paradigm. It has been also reported that unconstrained astrophysical processes may address the…
Recent measurements of cosmic-ray electron and positron fluxes by PAMELA and ATIC experiments may indicate the existence of annihilating dark matter with large annihilation cross section. We show that the dark matter annihilation in the…
Binary stars commonly pass through phases of direct interaction which result in the rapid loss of mass, energy, and angular momentum. Though crucial to understanding the fates of these systems, including their potential as gravitational…
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…
Gamma-ray bursts (hereafter GRB) produce a flux of radiation detectable across the observable Universe, and at least some of them are associated with galaxies. A GRB within our own Ggalaxy could do considerable damage to the Earth's…
Fluctuations in the mass and decay rate of a heavy particle which for some period dominates the energy density of the universe are known to lead to adiabatic density perturbations. We show that generically the annihilation cross section of…
We discuss a cosmology in which cold dark matter begins to decay into relativistic particles at a recent epoch (z < 1). We show that the large entropy production and associated bulk viscosity from such decays leads to an accelerating…
Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented whose history is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but…
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…
The Universe's early thermal history is poorly constrained, and it is possible that it underwent a period of early matter domination driven by a heavy particle or an oscillating scalar field that decayed into radiation before the onset of…
Some binary stars experience common envelope evolution, which is accompanied by drastic loss of angular momentum, mass, and orbital energy and which leaves behind close binaries often involving at least one white dwarf, neutron star, or…