Its name is Radcliffe Onda and it is a gigant It would have swept our entire solar system about 14 million years ago.
While its existence was already known, it has only recently been discovered that The land crossed it about 13 million years ago, immersing our planet in “a supernovas festival”according to the astrophysics of Harvard University, Catherine Zucker.
Now, the doctoral student at Vienna Efrem Maconi believes that our entire solar system may have gone through this incredible structure. Using data from the Gaia telescope of the European Space Agency, Maconi and its equipment They identified recently formed stars and the gases that surrounded them Within the radcliffe wave to see how the structure itself seems to move.
When comparing this data with the estimates of the trajectory of our solar system, the Maconi team discovered that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were close to each other between 12 and 15 million years ago. In short, scientists They calculated that we passed through the wave about 14 million years ago. On a geological and even evolutionary scalethat is incredibly recent.
Together with the finding, Maconi also assured in an interview that the sky would have been very different for anyone who looked at him from the earth when our solar system passed through the Radcliffe wave. “If we are in A densest region of the interstellar half, that would mean that the light that comes from the stars to you would be attenuated -says Maconi -. It’s like being on a fog day. ”
Extrapolate this finding even more, the scientists responsible for this discovery also believe that there is the possibility that the radcliffe wave has played a role in the climatic cooling that occurred at the time of the middle Miocenewhen the temperatures plummeted and permanent ice layers were established.
Although not everyone agrees. For Ralph Schoenrich, associate professor of climate and physics at the University College in London, that can be an exaggeration. “A general rule is that geology triumphs over any cosmic influence -concludes Schoenrich -. If the continents move or the ocean currents are interruptedclimatic changes are produced from that, so I am very skeptical in that something else is needed. ”
Experts from the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University have more than a five years dedicated to studying this wave and conclude that They have barely scratched the surface of what we know.