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About two million years ago, the Solar System may have passed through a dense cloud of hydrogen and radioactive material. It compressed the heliosphere, the protective cocoon the Sun provides for Earth and the other planets. It's shown here as the dark gray bubble over the backdrop of interstellar space. This could have exposed Earth to high levels of radiation and influenced the climate, and possible human evolution. Photo courtesy of Opher, et al.
“Our results open a new window into the relationship between the evolution of life on Earth and our cosmic neighborhood.”heliosphere. The Sun has been moving through the LIC and will leave it in a few thousand years. The LIC is not very dense. However, the denser clouds in the ISM are dense enough to dramatically affect the protective heliosphere. “The ISM in the vicinity of the Solar System also harbours a few, rare, dense, cold clouds that are called the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds,” they write.
There are questions about the nature of these clouds in the past. “Note that these clouds are anomalous and unexplained structures in the ISM, and their origin and physics are not well understood,” the authors write. Their work is based on the assumption that they haven’t changed substantially in the 2 million years since the purported encounter.
“Very few works have investigated the climatic effects of such encounters quantitatively in the context of encounters with dense giant molecular clouds. Some argue that such high densities would deplete the ozone in the mid-atmosphere and eventually cool the Earth,” they write.
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