Here is one more nail hammered into the coffin of the "great late bombardment", a forty-year-old theory of the formation of the Solar System according to which a meteor shower fell on young planets some 600 million years after their birth. (i.e. 3.9 billion years ago).
This gigantic deluge of meteorites on all the bodies of the Solar System would have been caused by a sudden migration of the giant planets, in particular Neptune and Uranus, which, by moving away from the Sun, would have destabilized the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, scattering large amounts of "pebbles".
But the hypothesis is challenged, and a Japanese study to appear in the November issue of
Earth and Planetary Science Letters
, based on meteorite analysis, brings a new argument to this revision.
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