Frequency of nearby supernovae and climatic and biological catastrophes

Abstract

MCCREA^1,2 has proposed that the encounter of the Solar System with a dense cloud of interstellar material during its passage through a spiral arm of the Galaxy may produce such climatic catastrophes on Earth as the ice epochs. His thesis, an extension of several earlier investigations^3,4,5, is based on the expected effect on the solar constant of an increased accretion rate. Unfortunately, the cloud density necessary to produce the required variation is 10⁵ to 10⁷ cm⁻³, and although clouds with such extreme densities are thought to exist⁶, Begelman and Rees⁷ point out that they are so compact and unusual as to reduce the likelihood of the Sun ever encountering one. (Dennison and Mansfield's suggestion⁸ that there is no evidence for the existence of a nearby super-dense cloud which could have caused the most recent ice epoch has been answered by McCrea⁹.) Begelman and Rees⁷ in fact showed that a much more modest cloud density (≃10² to 10³ cm⁻³) would prevent the solar wind from reaching the Earth, with resulting modification of the near-Earth environment; however, the climate consequences of such a modification are not well understood. We present here an alternative hypothesis which still retains McCrea's association with the passage of the Solar System through a spiral arm, but which relates the initiation of an ice epoch, plus biological catastrophes, to an encounter of the Solar System with a nearby supernova outburst rather than a super-dense interstellar cloud.