Like Saturn, Earth once had a ring around it

Like a mini-Saturn, around 466 million years ago Earth was likely surrounded by a ring of debris and dust, according to planetary scientists from Australia's Monash University coordinated by Andy Tomkins.

Researchers believe the ring has existed for several tens of millions of years: long enough to leave a geological footprint.

In fact, its existence was suggested by the large number of meteorites found by researchers in 21 craters, all of which fell to the Earth's surface in the Ordovician period, between 485 and 445 million years ago.

That is, over millions of years, the materials of the rings gradually fell to Earth. We see an extraordinary amount of meteorites from this period in sedimentary rocks as well,” adds Tomkins.

There are also many craters from the same period and their position is also interesting. They are all located within 30 degrees latitude of the equator. This is a fact that was not easy to identify, considering that at that time the actual continents did not exist, but the supercontinent Gondwana did.

Researchers have thus reconstructed that approximately 466 million years ago an asteroid was captured by Earth's gravity. It was not close enough to our planet to fall to the surface, but not far enough to avoid the so-called Roche boundary, which is the area where a small celestial body falls under the action of tidal forces until it breaks apart.

"That's how the ring was formed and when its fragments began to fall gradually, so ... the Earth was going through the Ice Age," says Tomkins.