The Moon received the impact of asteroids at the same time that the dinosaurs died on Earth

by time news

It only takes a glance to see that the Moon is literally full of impact craters of all sizes. They are everywhere. And now a team of researchers led by scientists at Australia’s Curtin University has just found that many of them coincide in time with some of the largest meteorite impacts on Earth, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. . The work has just been published in ‘Science Advances’. The researchers also found that the major impact events on our planet did not come alone, but were accompanied by a whole ‘swarm’ of smaller impacts, shedding entirely new light on the dynamics of asteroids in the inner Solar System and the outer Solar System. how the Earth could be affected. Glass beads To reach these conclusions, the team of scientists, led by Alexander Nemchin, studied microscopic glass beads up to 2 billion years old brought to Earth in 2020 by the Chinese Chang’e 5 lunar mission. The glass ‘drops’ were created by the heat and pressure of the lunar impacts, so their age distribution matches that of the craters, drawing a precise ‘timeline’ of those cosmic bombardments. According to Nemchin, the timing and frequency of those impacts are accurately reflected on Earth: “We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modeling and geological studies to determine how and when these microscopic glass beads on the Moon formed. And we found that some of the lunar glass bead age groups precisely match the ages of some of the largest impact craters on Earth, including the Chicxulub impact crater, which was responsible for the dinosaur extinction event.” . According to the scientist, the study reveals that “large impact events on Earth, such as the Chicxulub crater 66 million years ago, could have been accompanied by a series of smaller impacts. And if this is correct, the age and frequency distributions of impacts on the Moon could provide valuable information about impacts on Earth or the inner solar system.” MORE INFORMATION news No Nobel Prize in Medicine for Svante Pääbo, the man who told us that we are also Neanderthals news No The third attempt to launch the Artemis I mission is delayed until November Katarina Miljkovic , also from Curtin University and co-author of the research, He adds that future studies could allow a better understanding of the geological history of the Moon. “The next step -says the researcher- would be to compare the data obtained from these samples of Chang’e-5 with other lunar soils and crater ages in order to discover other significant impact events throughout the Moon that, in turn, could reveal new evidence about what impacts may have affected life on our planet.”

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