Earth may once have boasted something a Saturn-like ring, says a recent study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Key points
- The existence of such a ring, forming around 466 million years ago and persisting for a few tens of millions of years, could explain several puzzles in our planet’s past.
- Earth’s ring would have been like the rings seen today around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.
- It formed when an asteroid passed too close to Earth, was stretched by its gravity to the point it broke down into lots of small and large pieces. These pieces jostled around and gradually evolved into a debris-laden ring orbiting Earth’s equator.
- However, over time the material from the ring was pulled towards Earth, once again courtesy gravity. While most of the smaller pieces would have been burnt up in the planet’s atmosphere, the larger pieces would have formed impact craters on Earth surface, close to the equator.
- It is these impact craters that led scientists to discover the existence of a ring around Earth.
- Analysis of 21 crater sites dated to between 488 million and 443 million years ago to the Ordovician period, found that the impacts all occurred close to the equator.
