Ice Age Caused By Space Clouds, New Research Finds Stellar Discovery

When the Earth was outside of the Sun’s protective heliosphere layer, our planet would get exposed to an excess of elements like iron and plutonium, which lined up with a spike of plutonium-244 and iron-60 isotopes around the time of the Pleistocene. The Ice Age space cloud theory could be further tested by taking samples from Mars, according to Opher, to see if there’s a spike in iron isotopes around the same time period. The timeline of the cloud blockage is uncertain, too, as Opher said that the heliosphere could have been blocked for just a couple hundred of years or up to a million years.