The ripple effect on life on Earth must have been profound, researchers say (Picture)
Paris:
A giant meteor shower bombarded the Earth and the Moon 800 million years ago with more than 30 times the force of the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs, new research revealed Tuesday.
Japanese scientists examined images taken by the Kaguya lunar orbiter and discovered that a huge asteroid – at least 100 kilometers (60 miles) in diameter – shattered and plunged into the Earth-Moon system, having a profound impact on life on our planet. .
The probability of an asteroid of this size hitting Earth is about once every 100 million years, and meteor impact craters created before 600 million years ago have been erased by eons. erosion and other geological processes.
But there is virtually no erosion on the Moon, allowing the team to reconstruct the history of nearly 60 large craters.
Researchers at Osaka University looked at the age at which large craters were formed by examining the density of the smaller craters in their ejecta range – where pieces of rock would have landed after the main impact .
They used scale laws and collision probabilities to calculate that the mass of meteors hitting the Earth and the Moon was 40 to 50 million billion tons, 30 to 60 times the impact event. from Chicxulub.
This strike, some 65 million years ago in what is modern Mexico, is believed to have led to the mass extinction of more than three-quarters of life on Earth, including non-avian dinosaurs.
The team said the shower 800 million years ago hit Earth just before the Cryo-Era, which saw a planet-wide ice age between 720 and 635 million years ago.
Writing in the journal Nature Communications, they said the ripple effect on life on Earth must be profound.
“Our new discovery suggests that the flow of extraterrestrial elements may have influenced marine biogeochemical cycles … severe disruption of Earth’s climate system and the emergence of animals,” they said.
The Kaguya mission was launched in 2007 and studied the Earth’s satellite in then-unprecedented detail, including the dark side of the Moon and its magnetic field.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
