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The latter 290 million years ago, asteroids began to fall more intensely onto the Earth and Moon.After several badyzes, researchers can already badume what would have caused this change.
In recent decades, scientists have been trying to determine how often asteroids reach Earth. For this, they determined the age of the craters formed by the collision of celestial bodies with our planet.
However, it is quite difficult to find on the surface of the Earth craters dating back more than 290 million years. It was believed that the older ones simply disappeared because of geological processes.
To solve this problem, scientists decided to study "their lunar" congeners. According to them, the frequency with which asteroids began to reach the Earth and the Moon increased during the same period. But since our satellite is not subject to geological processes, many craters have been preserved there.
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NASA. Scientists have estimated the age of all craters on the moon. The blue dots mark the craters younger, whose age does not exceed 290 million years. Thus, using the lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) of NASA, they determined that the oldest lunar crater formed by asteroids was about 1 billion years old. . Nevertheless, on the Moon, there are few such craters. The age of most of them does not exceed 290 million years, just like those of the Earth.
According to their badumption, space objects, such as asteroids, will become more "active" as a result of a collision between celestial bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars' orbits and Jupiter 290 million years ago. Since then, they point out, the number of asteroids hitting the Earth and Moon has been multiplied by two or three.
"We can say that under such conditions, the fate of the dinosaurs was predetermined," said study author Thomas Gernon of the University of Southampton (United Kingdom )
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