Extinction Of Dinosaurs :: essays research papers

Could an exploding star have been responsible for the death of the dinosaurs? Thisidea has become popular again as an explanation for the fade of thedinosaurs. An exploding star can blast material enormous distances into space. Ifthis material reached Earth&8217s atmosphere, changes may have occurred that wereharmful to life. We call an exploding star a supernova. Nova is the Latin word for new, and inancient quantify, when an exploding star was observed, people often thought a newstar was being born. The plural form of nova is novae. So when we speech of more thanone supernova, we say supernovae. When a star has used all it&8217s nuclear fuel, the gravitational force that pullsthe star&8217s material towards it&8217s center no longer has an opposing force to actagainst it. As a result the star collapses. A star that once had eight times as muchmatter as our sun and was 1,000,000 miles across, becomes a sphere only ten tofifteen miles across. As the star collapses, very small par ticles (called neutrinos) escape cock into space. After the star becomes a very small sphere, it explodes like agiant nuclear bomb and becomes a billion times as pictorial as our own sun. All kindsof matter and radiation are blasted into space. This matter and radiation travelsthrough space at nearly the speed of neat (186,000 miles per second)Now, if one of these supernovae were to occur within about 130 light long timeof Earth, some scientists feel that life on earth would be drastically affected.Since a light year is the distance light travels in one year, 130 light years is about760,000,000,000,000 (760 quadrillion miles). So, suppose a supernova had occurred sixty-five million years ago within 130light years of Earth, how exactly would it cause the death of the dinosaurs? Somescientists think neutrinos and galactic cosmic rays would cause extremely last