USA Today’s Dan Vergano offers an antidote, from the world of science via dark matter thumping its way through the neighborhood,  to the fab-looking special effects one sees in the promos for the film 2012. That’s the film whose makers made a bunch of stuff up (while slyly suggesting that their plot is plausible) to argue that cosmic catastrophe is about to visit our poor little planet.

Vergano’s piece is an exercize in pure science non-fiction escapism that pushes some of the same awesome-awful-universe buttons. The news is the hypothesis, by an Australian astrophysicist writing in a Royal Astronomical Society journal, that a dense pocket of dark matter hurtled through the Milky Way within the past 60 million years. It could be the reason for a distinctive “Gould Belt” of newborn stars long recognized and embedded in the Milky Way. The Sun is not newborn, but the Gould Belt goes through our general position in the Milky Way. The Orion Nebula and its star-forming factories are in it too. The occult bolus may have passed near enough to our solar system to have given a shove to the Oort cloud and sent an extra dose of comets toward the inner solar system. That’s what Vergano reports. He called a few other authorities, who tell him it could be and that the modeling of such an event is consistent with a remanent ring such as we see now. Nice.

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.