(CNN) — Throughout Earth’s ancient history, our planet has been bombarded with a variety of foreign objects, some of which may have been triggered important events that they make up this place that we now call home.
According to a new study, one of those incidents was a massive asteroid shower that bombarded Earth and the Moon 800 million years ago.
During this monstrous rain, the asteroids that collided with Earth were much larger than the asteroid responsible for the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago, the researchers believe.
There is also evidence that an asteroid shower that hit Earth 470 million years ago could have caused a drop in sea level, icy conditions and contributed to biodiversity.
If we advance to 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub impact crater, below the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and located on the high seas near the city of Chicxulub, it was formed when a large meteorite between 10.9 and 80.9 kilometers in diameter hit Earth.
However, this newly discovered event that occurred 800 million years ago involved an asteroid shower with a total mass between 30 and 60 times greater than that of the asteroid that Chicxulub created.
This impact occurred before the Cryogenic period between 635 million and 720 million years ago, when Earth was covered in frozen deserts. This was an era of major environmental and biological changes, the researchers said.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
This suggests “that it is not strange that an asteroid shower 800 million years ago triggered the Ice Age, because a total mass flow 800 million years ago is 10 to 100 times greater than those of the Chicxulub impact and / or a 470 meteor shower millions of years ago, ”Kentaro Terada, lead author of the study and professor at the University of Osaka in Japan, said in an email.
The story told by lunar craters
Due to erosion and the coating that occurs on Earth caused by volcanoes and other geological processes, it is difficult for scientists to study how our planet was impacted in the past by asteroids and the date on which they occurred. The researchers believe that any impact crater on Earth earlier than 600 million years has been erased.
That’s why the Moon, which has largely been unchanged by erosion and weathering, has provided a fruitful alternative path for scientists to study the craters and reconstruct the shared history of Earth and the Moon.
In this new study, the researchers used data collected by the Kaguya lunar orbiter from the Japanese Space Agency. Of the 59 craters on the moon that the researchers observed to have diameters greater than 20 kilometers in diameter, eight of the craters appear to have formed at the same time. This includes the Copernicus crater, which is 93 km in diameter.
Astronauts from Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon, took samples of what they believed was material ejected from the Copernicus crater when it was created. The samples, which were collected after landing on November 19, 1969, were dated to 800 million years old, according to NASA.
These eight craters likely formed simultaneously when a 100-kilometer-diameter asteroid was smashed, impacting both Earth and the Moon.
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During the asteroid shower, there was a large amount of phosphorous left on Earth and “large amounts of volatile elements such as carbon, nitrogen and water remained on the surface of the dry Moon,” Terada said.
Phosphorus could have acted as a nutritional element to promote increased algae growth on Earth, Terada said. It is also possible that the arrival of elements through asteroids on Earth has “influenced marine biogeochemical cycles, severe disturbances in Earth’s climate system and the emergence of animals,” the authors wrote in the study.
The asteroid Eulalia, a type C asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have caused the asteroid shower, the researchers theorized. Type C asteroids contain carbon and are the most common asteroids in our solar system.
Eulalia may be Ryugu’s main body, an asteroid explored and sampled by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2. The asteroid samples are currently back on Earth. Ryugu is a top-shaped debris pile asteroid. A rubble pile asteroid is a grouping of rocks held together by gravity rather than individual objects.
There are similarities between Eulalia and Ryugu’s surface that have suggested that Ryugu may have been part of Eulalia.
If anything caused a breakdown of Eulalia, with fragments breaking apart and forming separate asteroids, it is possible that this created an asteroid shower that would impact Earth and the Moon, while also creating near Earth asteroids.
Terada, a member of Ryugu’s first sample characterization team, will help date Ryugu’s returned samples, which could confirm his “father” and determine if he was created during this asteroid disruption event.
“If Ryugu’s sample reaches the age of 800 million years, I will be very excited,” said Terada.
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