[danieldrehmer]

What about the fringy hypothesis of solar mini-novas to explain the extinctions?

Would appreciate some thoughts on the plausibility of this.

There’s a growing internet movement of people pushing this and they sound geekier than your usual conspiracy theorist.

[sgt101]

We can see very large populations of sun like stars, and there are no observations of this kind of behaviour, so it seems unlikely. The large full sky survey telescopes coming on-line in the next few years will rule this out our in after a decade or so though. If billion sun like stars are watched for five years at least fifty should pop in a micro nova if the theory has any legs.

[perl4ever]

I have no pre-existing knowledge of the subject, but a quick search turned up something about the Sun being much less active than similar stars:

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-sun-similar-stars.html

If this is accurate, then it raises the question of whether the Sun is inherently and always less active or whether it just happens to be quiet while human civilization has arisen.

[KKPMW]

As far as I am aware there are observations of this behaviour. Several are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae

[cowboysauce]

Are any of those from sun-like stars? The ones listed all seem to involve white dwarfs.

[czbond]

Watched enough 'PBS Space Time' to not be illiterate, but still a CompSci background so take my physics with a huge grain of salt. ;)

Is there some way we could tell a distinction between a local event and a long range event with a method (for example: an alignment of particles or minerals in rocks in a particular direction)?

[KKPMW]

I came here looking for this discussion. If someone wants to know more about it (for the sake of curiosity, not believing it like it's the gospel) here is the outline of the theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvjJqIXYT1w&list=PLHSoxioQtw...