• 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

Tiny Glass Beads Reveal Timing Of Lunar Craters May Coincide With Major Impacts On Earth

September 29, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Death from the skies may not come in an isolated event. Instead, major asteroid impacts may be accompanied by smaller objects hitting the Earth – and the Moon too. The ages of lunar glass collected by the Chang’e-5 mission indicate clusters of craters coinciding with the Chicxulub event, plus two other periods associated with large terrestrial impacts.

Just last month, a crater was discovered off the west coast of Africa dated to within a million years of the Chicxulub crater. The smaller crater’s discoverers thought the similarity in timing might mean the Earth was hit by a double asteroid 65 million years ago, larger counterparts to the Dimorphos/Didymos pair NASA targeted with yesterday’s DART mission. Alternatively, a disturbance in the asteroid belt may have caused a number of asteroids to enter Earth-crossing paths at the same time, eventually causing multiple hits to our planet.

Advertisement

That scenario is looking considerably more likely thanks to an analysis of glass beads produced by cosmic impacts and returned in Chang’e-5’s samples. Such beads are rare on Earth, with our atmosphere protecting us from small asteroids and sometimes breaking up medium-sized ones. Those that do form get buried by geologic processes. On the Moon, however, they are abundant.

“We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modelling, and geological surveys to determine how these microscopic glass beads from the Moon were formed and when,” Professor Alexander Nemchin of Curtin University in a statement. “We found that some of the age groups of the lunar glass beads coincide precisely with the ages of some of the largest terrestrial impact crater events, including the Chicxulub impact crater responsible for the dinosaur extinction event.”

The authors established the beads’ ages by measuring how much of the uranium they contain has decayed to lead. Using the sizes of nearby craters, they created statistical models of the chances each was responsible for the beads being studied.

glass beads of varying sizes on a white background

Chang’e-5 glass beads. Image Credit: Beijing SHRIMP Center, Institute of Geology, CAGS

The technique produced quite wide error bars for the craters’ ages, but the authors note; “14 of the 30 craters have model ages between 53 ± 12 and 73 ± 10 [million years ago], including the second largest crater.”

Curtin’s Dr Katarina Miljkovic told IFLScience the most likely explanation for this was that something disturbed a main belt asteroid, bringing it into an Earth-crossing orbit. An event such as a collision with a smaller object caused it to break into many pieces. The largest of these ended the Cretaceous Era, and small pieces struck both the Earth and the Moon. “We see a family of meteorites that are alike and probably come from the main source, so we know break-ups like this happen,” she said. “The chances of disturbing a number of asteroids so that all end up crossing the Earth’s path is much smaller, but this is an educated guess.”

Miljkovic added that “Any number of things” could have been responsible for changing the parent asteroid’s orbit.

Advertisement

The authors also report an uptick in beads around 34 million years old. This coincides with the 100-kilometer (60-mile) wide Popigai crater and three smaller sites, collectively known as the Late Eocene craters. The largest crater in Chang’e-5’s vicinity is estimated at 479 million years old, coinciding with the Ordovician craters on Earth, suggesting displaced asteroids around both those times.

The study was restricted by the beads all being from one location, where a lava flow around 2 billion years ago covered whatever had been created previously. “We caught a snippet of history, but probably not a complete picture.” Miljkovic told IFLScience. For that, beads will need to be collected from a wider range of lunar locations.

This paper was published in Science Advances (Open Access).

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China will maintain prudent monetary policy, says central bank official
  2. France says needs clarifications, explanations from U.S. after submarine deal
  3. MLB roundup: Salvador Perez breaks single-season HR mark for catchers
  4. Abu Dhabi’s Etihad seeks to hire up to 1,000 cabin crew

Source Link: Tiny Glass Beads Reveal Timing Of Lunar Craters May Coincide With Major Impacts On Earth

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Chimps Are Sticking Grass In Their Ears And Rears As They Embrace “Pointless” Fad
  • Hui Te Rangiora: Old Māori Legend Suggests They May Have Discovered Antarctica 1,000 Years Before Europeans
  • “Potential Impact On Saturn”: Astronomers Appeal For Help As Video Appears To Show Object Hitting The Gas Giant
  • What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? The “Exceedingly Rare” Condition That Made A Patient See Faces As Dragons
  • Are We In An Enormous Void? It Could Explain What’s Wrong With Our Model Of The Universe
  • Woylies Boing Back Into Western Australia Thanks To Groundbreaking Wildlife Project
  • North America’s Oldest Pterosaur And Turtle Fossils Found In Arizona’s Petrified Forest
  • Proposed “Dark Dwarfs” Near The Galactic Center Could Reveal The Nature Of Dark Matter
  • Watch: 18-Kilometer-High Ash Cloud Looms Over Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki After “Explosive” Eruption
  • “ShipGoo001”: Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship
  • Rare White Humpback Whale Calf Filmed By Drone Off Australia’s East Coast
  • Who Was Buried At Cave Of Salome: A Female Disciple, Jesus’ Midwife, Or A Princess?
  • “Hidden” Changes To US Health Data Swapping “Gender” For “Sex” Spark Fears For Public Trust
  • Easter Island Was Never As Isolated As We Thought – Study Puts That “Strange Argument” To Bed
  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Why Are So Many Enormous Roman Shoes Being Discovered At Hadrian’s Wall?
  • Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed Structural Differences In Psychopaths’ Brains
  • We’ve Found Our Third-Ever Interstellar Visitor, Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild, And Much More This Week
  • The “Eyes Of Clavius” Will Be Visible On The Moon Today, Thanks To Clair-Obscur Effect
  • 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