Interesting new theory that during the Ordovician the Earth captured an asteroid close and large enough to be torn apart forming a ring that gradually rained down on Earth.
It was already known from a mine in Sweden that small meteorites were raining down at around a hundred times the current rate at around the same time
The original idea was that this rain was the result of a major collision in the asteroid belt
I’m not sure how the new theory reflects on that–maybe the ringmaker could have been the whole source of the rain, invalidating the collision theory, maybe both could be results of the collision.
My first (and mostly irrelevant) comment is, this is one of the weirdest comparisons I’ve ever read in a science article:
The chances of this happening are like tossing a three-sided coin (if such a thing existed) and getting tails 21 times.
WTF does this mean? Are they trying to say the chances are 1 in 10 billion? Why not just say so? Or if they had to make a coin-tossing analogy, why not say it’s like tossing a (2-sided) coin and getting tails 33 times? How does referring to a nonexistent three-sided coin help anyone understand this?