Researchers find link between lunar ‘glass beads,’ dinosaurs’ downfall
An Australian-led team of scientists have analyzed glass formed by heat and pressure of ancient asteroids hitting the moon, which they believe might provide insights into the extinction of dinosaurs and predictions about future asteroid activities.
Their research, published online in Science Advances and revealed on Thursday, is based on microscopic glass beads aged up to 2 billion years that were found in lunar soil collected during China’s Chang’e-5 lunar mission.
The team of scientists led by Curtin University believed that asteroids such as those which presumably led to the downfall of dinosaurs were not “stand-alone events,” but rather were accompanied by a series of smaller impacts such as those that struck the moon.
As such, the research could offer insights into the likelihood of potentially devastating Earth-bound asteroids.
“The possibility of uneven distribution of impacts in time was considered before, so in a way, our aim was to test that this is correct. It will still require further analysis of other samples, but now we are getting more confident that impactors probably come in groups, rather than being isolated events,” lead researcher and professor Alexander Nemchin said.
In an article by Nemchin and co-author and associate professor Katarina Miljkovic, they explained that erosion and geological activity on Earth erase much of the evidence of past impacts. On the moon, however, there is no such environmental deterioration, so impact craters are much more prevalent, as well as the glass beads leftover in the lunar soils.
“The next step would be to compare the data gleaned from these samples with other lunar soils and crater ages to be able to uncover other significant moon-wide impact events which might in turn reveal new evidence about what impacts may have affected life on Earth,” Miljkovic said.
