Rings Around Earth From Ancient Meteorites

HorsePunchKid writes "According to an article on CNN (SNL version), ancient meteorites may have glanced off of the surface and shattered, causing rings around the Earth. These rings, which may have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, could have had a profound effect on the climate in tropical regions, where the rings would block out light from the Sun. Still rather speculative, but the theory may help explain some patterns observed in the geological record. The idea has been around for a while, and some scientists are skeptical."

Comments

I still favour the fire theories...

[purduephotog]

Given a large impact that engulfs some 20% of the land mass in flame...

Said impact ejecta would be thrown up and into the stratosphere, circle, and land somewhere opposite (say 3/4) around the globe. More impacts, more fire. Lots of soot to block out light.

I can see a 'ring' of debris specifically targetting the tropics region, but i just have trouble dealing with the numbers of objects required to decrease the light that significantly resulting in a sphere of Earths size being cooled that significantly.

Suffice to say, the ring is there, but I'd still throw my support behind half the planet burning up as a more tangible reason.

Wrong

[ACNeal]

We already know that the climate of the earth has never changed since the beginning of time. That is until the last 50 years or so, when man has started to burn fossil fuels and using hair spray.

This is totally unbelievable. The climate change is totally man caused, and we are the only people that can change it.

Re:Wrong

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Maybe I'm responding to a troll here

Yup

Anyhoo, the only reason I personally worry about humans affecting the climate is that there is evidence that the climate of the earth has swung erratically many times. Human civilization developed when it seemed to settle down a bit. If we have another ice age, civilization as we know it is fucked.

Course, maybe *not* burning fossil fuels is going to cause a massive climate change (ie/ perhaps a greenhouse effect will delay the inevitable ice age). In which case, we're fucked.

Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't.

Fuck, eh?

(Damn, that was a gratuitous use of profanities... Kids, don't read this post!)

Ring around the planet?

[RomSteady]

Damn...I thought I only had to worry about "ring around the collar." [grin]

Seriously, though, does anyone else seem to notice that we only notice problems when scientists discover an explanation for it? We were polluting like mad, and then scientists discovered the ozone layer was being depleted, and we suddenly "noticed" global warning. People were smoking like chimneys, and scientists discovered that what is in cigarettes causes someone with a genetic predisposition for cancer to generate tumors, and we suddenly "noticed" that people who smoked lived a little bit shorter lives.

I'm not intending to say that ignorance is bliss, but sometimes, it seems that way.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go have unprotected sex with this person over here, or has science found out something about that recently...[grin]

Re:Ring around the planet?

[HorsePunchKid]

That idea is actually discussed to some extent in The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, albeit in the context of physics. I guess the book is somewhat dated now, but I think it's still well worth a read if you're interested. Basically, one of the chapters brought up the notion that none of these particles (particularly the "strange" new ones... kaons, pions, and whatnot) didn't seem to exist until we came up with a theory that implied that they should exist. Think of the electron, for example. We didn't have any clue about it until some guy started doing crazy experiments. People had been happy to accept electricity as some kind of fluid up until that point. Just food for thought. I personally don't see much value in the idea :).

Repost from Tuesday

[tbmaddux]

Look here.

Billy Mays

[huntz0r]

If you've got tough, stubborn ring around the earth, OXI-CLEAN is your answer! It's the Stain Specialist!

about skepticism

[benploni]

> and some scientists are skeptical.

ALL scientists are skeptical. It's a basic requirement of the scientific method, and a reason it works wso damn well.

Re:about skepticism

[Burgundy Advocate]

Unfortunately, it usually doesn't work that way. Scientists divide themselves into their seperate camps, and sometimes turn a blind eye to the inconsistencies in their own theories.

The sad fact is that scientists are human. They have their own allegiances -- not always to the scientific method. Some are quite petty.

"a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
--Max Planck

Thomas Kuhn had a lot to say about this. Learn more here.

Here's the real scoop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rings? Ancient Meteorites? Surely they must be joking! I heard from a good friend in military intelligence that those rings are really just exhaust plumbs from all the aliens buzzing our planet at low warp!

Tom

Re:whoa

[dalassa]

Actually since the Big Bang occured in all parts of the universe at the same time, because the universe was an infinatly small point, the leftover radiation is everywhere in the universe. It hasn't traveled as much as the universe has increased in size.

Or I could be trying to do astronomy in my head right after I woke up.

Re:What happened to the debris?

[archen]

rings are in fact fundamentally unstable. Eventually the rings around all the other planets (which is a LONG time by human standards) will eventually degrade and disapear. Which is sort of sad to think of Saturn without any rings.

Uranus has rings!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote from my son's book on the planets:

Uranus is a gas giant, filled with methane and many toxic gases. Uranus is blue. Uranus has rings. As you can see, Uranus is full of surprises!

Try reading that to a kid with a straight face!

Can I be skeptical, too?

[shimmin]

I'm not a planetary scientist, but I'm still skeptical. So a rock gets blasted off the surface of the earth with some ballistic trajectory. Unless something acts on it near apogee to circularize its orbit, that orbit will return to the point it began (which lies inside the atmosphere).

So most of the rocks from such a collision will either be on an escape trajectory to become interplanteary debris, or secondary meterites that will fall over the next few days.

Where's the circularizing force in these models to put debris into long-term stable orbits?

Re:Can I be skeptical, too?

[mysticgoat]

Unless something acts on it near apogee to circularize its orbit, that orbit will return to the point it began (which lies inside the atmosphere)

No. The model of orbital mechanics that you are using does not contain enough objects. Here is a more realistic way of visualizing the process:

Instead of looking at one chunk of rock in a billiard-like model, think in terms of the spray of material that would be generated by a glancing strike (which is also the most likely kind). Most of the particles in this spray will not have orbital velocity and will rain back down, with the larger and faster ones making a string of secondary impact craters. A much smaller portion will reach escape velocity and become interplanetary objects.

But what is significant is the group of particles whose velocities exceed orbital velocity but do not reach escape velocity. That is a pretty wide range of speeds. At first these objects will also have a wide range of apogees and perigees, but they will mostly be in the same plane. Their own gravitational interactions and collisions will redistribute the kinetic energy of the group as a whole into a ring. In essence, the circularizing agent that you are looking for is the aggregate effect of the group on each individual member, a sort of gravitational peer pressure. Ring formation is probably a positive feedback process, where the proto ring's growth increases its influence on the remaining wild particles.

There are three ring shepherds that will cause any debris ring (any satellite for that matter) to seek an equatorial orbit over time: the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth's equatorial bulge. I imagine the Moon's presence would also assure that any Earth ring would be relatively short lived.

I would also think that any Earth ring formed in this way would be quite bright, at least for a while. I would think the ejecta stream would suck along a lot of air and water vapor through entrainment, and that many of the ring particles would be frosted as they cooled.

I'm not saying I'm convinced that this happened. But it is an intriguing scenario and might go far to explain ice ages and such. One of the more intriguing things about it is that it appears to be testable in several different ways.