Find out the 'alien force' that slows down the development of the planet

A team of scientists from the US and Japan has found traces of a series of ancient asteroids that hit the Earth during the Paleozoic, causing the Earth to become breathless for the first few billion years.

Landscape of the Earth in the Paleozoic - (Photo: SwRI / Dan Durda / Simone Marchi).

According to Sci-News, when large asteroids or comets collide with the young Earth , it generates energy that releases rock materials that melt and evaporate in the Earth's crust. These ejected molten rock droplets would then condense, solidify, and fall back to Earth, creating scattered "meteorite glass" or "collision balls" particles .

Research, just published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, led by Professor Nadja Drabon from Stanford University's Department of Geosciences (USA) has identified many thin and discrete layers filled with meteorite glass. in the Earth's crust, which are between 2.4 and 3.5 billion years old.

According to Science Alert, it is evidence that this period - belonging to the Archean era - the earth was under constant attack by "alien forces". The geological record shows that from the beginning of the Paleozoic (about 4 billion years ago), the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere began to increase, as the planet gradually balanced the processes of oxygen production and removal.

However, billions of years later, oxygen did not increase to a level suitable for life because alien attacks slowed atmospheric evolution. Objects more than 10 kilometers in diameter are more than likely the scarce oxygen in the early atmosphere to be chemically consumed, i.e., "burned up" by the collision.

So even though during that period the first organisms that lived on the planet, like cyanobacteria, tried to make oxygen, it wasn't enough to produce enough for life to evolve to higher levels. "Over time, the collisions became less and less frequent and smaller, causing the Earth's oxygen concentration to change significantly. After the Great Oxidation Event , the earth gradually turned into the planet it is today." - the authors explain.