Word: rampino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sniffing a connection, Rampino and a Goddard colleague, Astrophysicist Richard Stothers, among others, proposed an ingenious way that the oscillating journey might trigger bombardments on earth. Whenever the sun passes through the Milky Way plane, they suggested, the swirls of dust it encounters would gravitationally disrupt the Oort cloud, a vast bubble of comets that scientists believe surrounds the solar system at a distance of up to 10 trillion miles from the sun. Like a lazy fruit picker shaking plums from a tree, the dust would send showers of comets falling toward the sun. Some comets would collide with...
...theory made a big splash, explains Michael Rampino, of the Goddard Space Institute of Space Studies in New York. "They touched off a whole new field with some deep-seated implications...
...debris. The 33 million-year period corresponds roughly to the 26-million year cycle of extinction postulated by Raup and Sepkoski and the differences between the two figures can be accounted for by uncertainties in astronomical and geological datings, say the originators of the theory, Richard Smothers and Michael Rampino...
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