The Alvarez Hypothesis

The Alvarez hypothesis has been doing the rounds for decades now. In its own way it's a neat enough theory about how the dinosaurs became extinct, taking into account the iridium anomaly, the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and of course the mystery of why we don't see many velociraptors kicking around anymore.

The infamous meteor that supposedly did for our planet's most splendid ever land animals is actually briefly visible in the trailer for The Tree of Life. The Alvarez hypothesis also did sterling work in one of the more memorable Doctor Who serials of the 1980s when it served as an excuse for the then producer, in a moment of rejected gay spite, to kill off the Doctor's twinkiest ever male companion - for which the whole of geekdom can do doubt be eternally grateful.

Sadly, there's only one slight problem with it.

Which is that it's bollocks.

The hunt for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is back on, after a NASA mission indicated that the current suspected space rock is not the likely culprit.

A study in 2007, which used visible-light data from ground-based telescopes, had suggested that a fragment of a huge ancient asteroid known as Baptistina had been the one to plunge to Earth and annihilate the ancient reptiles. But NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has figured out that Baptistina broke up just 80 million years ago, which doesn't give the remnants enough time to make it to Earth and plunge the dinos into extinction 65 million years ago.

"The original calculations with visible light estimated the size and reflectivity of the Baptistina family members, leading to estimates of their age, but we now know those estimates were off. With infrared light, WISE was able to get a more accurate estimate, which throws the timing of the Baptistina theory into question," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA.

[The Register]

Real science strikes again? You'd like to think. Sadly, "science" textbooks are unlikely to start printing truth - rather than what scientists would like to believe is true - any time soon, and all manner of extraterrestrial drivel is likely to stay very much within the margins of respectable "science" for a long while to come.