Research suggests Earth might have once boasted a spectacular ring similar to Saturn's, formed from an asteroid breakup around 466 million years ago. This event coincides with numerous meteorite impacts primarily around the equator and a subsequent period of significant global cooling.

A ring could explain a mysterious arrangement of impact craters near the equator and might even have caused an ice age, according to a new study

“Over millions of years, material from this ring gradually fell to Earth, creating the spike in meteorite impacts observed in the geological record,” said Tomkins in a statement that accompanied the paper’s release. “We … see that layers in sedimentary rocks from this period contain extraordinary amounts of meteorite debris.”