Startling new evidence suggests that Earth may have had its own ring system millions of years ago, similar to the iconic rings of Saturn. This intriguing discovery could explain several puzzles in our planet’s past and even shed light on a dramatic period of global cooling.
A Cosmic Wreck in the Sky
It consisted of a dramatic spike in meteorite impacts and meteorite debris strewn across the sedimentary rocks from Europe to China that were approximately 466 million years old. One idea is that the impact site was covered by sedimentary rocks, which were then preserved in a cold region of Marswere the meteorite debris would have been exposed to more space radiation or for shorter periods than are typical for Earth-fallen meteorites.
These sedimentary rocks looked unusual because they had been jumbled up; this post-November time was called ‘Tsunami Unit D’ and multiple tsunami events marked the period. All those events, researchers argue in a paper to be published Monday, were born of one big one — the explosion of an 8-kilometer-wide asteroid as it passed within about halfway between the Earth and moon 13,000 years ago.
They noted that only about 30 percent of the ground suitable for craters to be preserved was located close to the equator yet all 21 known meteorite impact craters from this period fell within a stripe around the planet’s middle. That would seem to indicate that the hits were not evenly spread across space, but hit in a particular zone and that’s where the ring system spanning Saturn’s equator comes in.
How the Rings May Form
The nearest thing we can think of is what the rings in other broiling ring systems are doing Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus have got them,” explains one of the researchers. When a small object like an asteroid approaches a larger body, such as a planet, the large astronomical body may stretch and tear smaller objects that pass nearby by its gravitational forces.
Close enough, and the smaller body will be torn apart into a myriad of big and small fragments inside the Roche limit. The fragments are slow to form a debris ring which in turn appears around the equator of the larger body. In time, the debris in the ring dwindles away to the point where all of it rains down on the planet, leaving behind few remnants but many larger fragments that pile up into impact craters at or near the equator.
Such a scenario could have produced the abnormal crater sites, meteorite remnants in sedimentary deposits, craters and sunamis crustolgical formations in very brief space radiation ages. It does indeed destroy and capture an asteroid for everything these changes tell us occurred 466 million years ago.
Conclusion
An ancient ring system that could reveal a pivotal time in Earth history may be present around our planet. It would not only solve the riddle of meteorite impacts and debris, but it could also help account for one of the coldest periods in Earth’s history the Hirnantian Ice Age 444 million years ago. Additional investigations of the possibility would be required to model what effect such a ring system might have had on Earth’s climate, but this tantalizing theory offers new possibilities in understanding early Earth history.
