• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Earth’s Past Ice Ages Could Have Been Triggered By Our Movement Through The Galaxy

August 28, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

As the Moon orbits the Earth, the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, oscillating up and down relative to the galactic plane as it does so. But this might have consequences, with a group of physicists suggesting that this motion of our star through the galaxy potentially takes us through regions of space that could affect our planet’s climate. 

Advertisement

According to the study detailing their findings, the Solar System may have passed through an interstellar cloud so dense that it could have interfered with the flow of the solar wind, potentially cooling the planets. 

The Solar System is protected, to some extent, from the interstellar medium (ISM) by our heliosphere.

“The Sun sends out a constant flow of charged particles called the solar wind, which ultimately travels past all the planets to some three times the distance to Pluto before being impeded by the interstellar medium,” NASA explains. “This forms a giant bubble around the Sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere.”



The Solar System is currently in a 1,000-light-year-wide “Local Bubble“, or “local interstellar cloud” (LIC). This “bubble” is a lot less dense than typical interstellar space, with 0.001 particles per cubic centimeter compared to the typical 0.1 atoms per cubic centimeter. The Solar System will leave this sparse region of space in the next few thousand years and head once more into the interstellar medium.

Looking at the Solar System’s path, and mapping the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds, the team found we have likely traveled through denser regions in the past.

Advertisement

“In the ISM that the Sun has traversed for the last couple of million years, there are cold, compact clouds that could have drastically affected the heliosphere,” the team explains in their paper. “We explore a scenario whereby the Solar System went through a cold gas cloud a few million years ago.”

Though research on the effects of traversing such regions has been sparser than atoms in the Local Bubble, the team believes it could have contracted our heliosphere, which in turn had an effect on our climate. Our heliosphere is protective, and as it contracted some of the material in these denser regions could reach Earth.

“Large amounts of neutral hydrogen as a result of an encounter with cold clouds with densities above 1,000 cm−3 will alter the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere,” the team writes. “Very few works have investigated the climatic effects of such encounters quantitatively in the context of encounters with dense giant molecular clouds. Some argue that such high densities would deplete the ozone in the mid-atmosphere (50–100 km [31–62 miles]) and eventually cool the Earth.”

The team says that geological evidence of increased amounts of 60Fe (iron 60) and 244Pu (plutonium 244) isotopes found in ice cores, the oceans, Antarctic snow, and samples of the Moon, could be evidence of these particles reaching Earth as we traversed the Local Lynx of Cold Cloud 2 million years ago. 

Advertisement

These isotopes are spat out by supernovas and neutron star mergers, which then become trapped by interstellar dust. These isotopes in the geological record have previously been explained as being sent here by a close supernova, but the current team believes they could be explained better by particles trapped in the cloud, as a close-by supernova would collapse the heliosphere to distances of 1 AU (the distance between the Earth and the Sun), while a further afield supernova would not deposit enough 60Fe on Earth.

“This paper is the first to quantitatively show there was an encounter between the Sun and something outside of the solar system that would have affected Earth’s climate,” space physicist at Boston University, Merav Opher, said in a statement, later adding, “but as soon as the Earth was away from the cold cloud, the heliosphere engulfed all the planets, including Earth.”

The contraction of the heliosphere could have lasted from hundreds of years to a million years, according to the team, and it is likely we will encounter another such heliosphere-contracting cloud within another million years or so. 

While interesting, there is a lot more to find out.

Advertisement

“This work should be revisited with modern atmospheric modelling,” the team writes. “It has been suggested that climate changes around this time could have affected human evolution. The hypothesis is that the emergence of our species Homo sapiens was shaped by the need to adapt to climate change. With the shrinkage of the heliosphere, the Earth was exposed directly to the ISM.”

The study is published in Nature Astronomy.

An earlier version of this article was published in June 2024.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Varo Bank raises massive $510M Series E at a $2.5B valuation as it eyes the public markets
  2. Cricket-British PM Johnson asks Australia to help resolve Ashes stand-off
  3. Soccer-Australian FA will probe allegations of abuse in women’s game
  4. Researchers Discover 18th-Century Clay Tobacco Pipes Were Used As Weapons And Surgical Tools

Source Link: Earth's Past Ice Ages Could Have Been Triggered By Our Movement Through The Galaxy

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Why Do Orcas Have White Spots Near Their Eyes?
  • Tomb Of First King Of Ancient Maya City Discovered In Belize
  • The Real Reason The Tip Of Your Tape Measure Wiggles Like That
  • The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm
  • Adorable Video Proves Not All Gorillas Hate The Rain. It Might Even Win One A Mate
  • 5,000-Year-Old Rock Art May Show One Of Ancient Egypt’s First Rulers
  • Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Levels “20 Times Higher” In Newborn Babies – What Does This Mean?
  • Americans Were Asked If They Thought Civil War Was Coming. The Results Were Unexpected
  • Voyager 1 & 2 Could Be Detected From Almost A Light-Year Away With Our Current Technology
  • Dams Have Nudged Earth’s Poles By Over 1 Meter In The Past 200 Years
  • This Sugar Could Be A Cure For Male Pattern Baldness – And It’s Been In Our Bodies All Along
  • “Cosmic Immigrants”: Daytime Star Seen In 1604 May Be An “Alien Type Ia Supernova”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version