Impacts, Extinctions And Climate In The Search For Life Elsewhere

Space





Photo credit:

A reconstruction of the path and damage caused by the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 15, 2013. Flickr/Sandia Labs, CC BY-NC-ND

Every so often our Earth encounters a large chunk of space debris which reminds us that our solar system still contains plenty of debris that could potentially have an impact on life on Earth.

While the great bulk of planetary accretion occurs in the first few hundred million years after the birth of a given system, the process never really comes to an end.