A Supernova From Deep Space May Have Altered Evolution on Earth Forever, Scientists Say
Some 2.5 million years ago, viruses in Lake Tanganyika experienced an unexplained explosion in diversity.
A new study analyzing iron-60 found in the lakebed suggests that the explosion of a 'nearby' supernova may be responsible for this evolutionary event.
Although the study doesn't confirm this cosmic connection, it shows that the timelines match up almost perfectly.
Sometimes deep space can seem like a cold, uncaring place fully removed from the dramas unfolding on the planet Earth. However, a new study from scientists at University of California Santa Cruz theorizes that the machinations of the cosmos can, in fact, impact the minute details of life on our home world.
In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers lay out a compelling cosmic tale affecting some of the smallest forms of life on our planet. The story goes that 2.5 million years ago, radiation from a supernova—either in the Scorpius-Centaurus group (460 light-years away) or the Tucana-Horologium group (230 light-years away)—began bathing Earth in radiation for roughly 100,000 years.
Due to its isolation by the East African Rift, Lake Tanganyika—which lies along the borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Burundi, and Zambia—experienced an explosion in its diversity of viruses. According to the new study, this yet-unexplained increase in the lake's viral population could be related to cosmic radiation breaking apart viral DNA, spurring mutations and (as a result) speciation.
'It's really cool to find ways in which these super distant things could impact our lives or the planet's habitability,' Caitlyn Nojiri, lead author of the study and UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, said in a press statement. 'We saw from other papers that radiation can damage DNA. That could be an accelerant for evolutionary changes or mutations in cells.'
The key to understanding this 2.5-million-year-old cellular drama is iron-60, an isotope of iron primarily produced in the fiery explosions of supernovae. After analyzing samples from the lakebed, Nojiri and her team isolated two distinct populations for iron-60—one that formed 2.5 million years ago (the supernova one) and another that formed four millions years later. This later cache of iron-60, the authors theorize, likely arrived on Earth as the planet entered the part of the Milky Way known as the 'Local Bubble,' which is a low-density region with the remnants of exploded star stuff filling the area around its exterior (the Earth is currently near the center of this bubble).
'The iron-60 is a way to trace back when the supernovae were occurring,' Nojiri said. 'From two to three million years ago, we think that a supernova happened nearby.'
When the researchers modeled these supernovae, it showed that they 'perfectly' fit previous data surrounding this spike in radiation.
Of course, the nearby explosion of a supernova and the increase in the diversification of viruses seen in one secluded African lake could be simply a coincidence—one data point that is uncorrelated with the other. Even Nojiri admits that the study doesn't prove that the two events are connected, 'but they have a similar timeframe,' Nojiri said.
However, the study does provide a particularly interesting piece of evidence that the cosmic goings-on in deep space may have had a more profound impact of the evolution of life on Earth than we previously believed.
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