Was the Earth, like Saturn, surrounded by a ring?

Researchers from Monash University in Australia, who explained their reasoning on Monday, September 16 on the university’s website, arrived at this question by looking at the ground. Like Saturn, was the Earth surrounded by a ring, nearly 500 million years ago? They observed the location of 21 fossilized meteorites found a few years ago in rock in different places around the world. Meteorites that were all formed 466 million years ago.

These very old meteorites of the same age and from the same family could come from the ring in question. The researchers found that instead of crashing into Earth randomly, they all landed on a strip located along what was at the time the equator. These researchers took the trouble to simulate the movement of tectonic plates, to go back in time and find the appearance of the continents, 460 million years ago. For them, this alignment of meteorites could be explained by the past existence of a ring of debris rotating around the Earth, and some rocks of which ended up crashing to the ground over time.

The ring itself is said to be the result of the explosion of a large asteroid, which disintegrated near the Earth and the debris orbited for several million years before eventually crashing one by one on Earth.

This theory is credible. At the dynamic level, it is a theory that holds up perfectly, according to Aurélien Crida, a research professor at the Côte d’Azur University and Observatory and a specialist in planetary rings. To fully validate the hypothesis, however, it would be necessary to find other fossil asteroids, which could have been part of this debris belt. But, for Frédéric Moynier, a professor at the University of Paris Cité, this work already confirms the occurrence of major asteroid collisions near the Earth, nearly 500 million years ago, an element that is already very instructive in trying to understand the history of our planet.