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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Star Collision Blamed For Dinosaur Extinction Theory Contends Massive Radiation Killed Off All But The Most Hardy

Michael Miller Associated Press

Israeli scientists have a new theory on why the dinosaurs became extinct: cosmic radiation that bombarded the Earth following the collision of two neutron stars.

Physicists from the Space Research Institute at the Technion University in Haifa theorize that the mass extinction 65 million years ago was caused by the merging of twin stars near the Earth inside the Milky Way galaxy.

This collision created a deadly wave of cosmic radiation that destroyed the protective layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, frying vegetation and obliterating most animal life, the researchers say.

“The study is actually an attempt to solve the biggest murder case in the history of life on Earth,” said Arnon Dar, a physics professor at the Technion, who with colleagues Nir Shaviv and Ari Lior has submitted the theory for publication in the journal Science.

There have been several theories that astral radiation caused mass extinctions.

David N. Schramm, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, suggested last year that exploding stars called supernovas could have caused another mass extinction - the most severe in Earth’s history - that killed 95 percent of all life 225 million years ago.

But Dar said supernovas could not have caused all six mass extinctions that swept over the Earth in the last 650 million years - one about every 100 million years.

“The rate of supernova explosion is not great enough to explain the 100 million year extinctions,” Dar said Sunday. “But the merging of neutron stars could be responsible.”

Twin stars merge every day somewhere in the universe, producing radiation in the form of gamma and cosmic rays that strike the Earth’s atmosphere.

Usually, the stars are too far away to do any damage and the radiation is harmlessly absorbed by the ozone layer.

But occasionally - about every 100 million years by Dar’s estimate - twin or binary stars collide close to Earth, producing devastating effects.