This artist’s concept captures the catastrophic collision that destroyed the parent body, which was bigger than any known asteroid break-up in the past 3 billion years.
(Credit: Don Davis/Southwest Research Institute.)

A giant collision between two asteroids may have triggered a global ice age that hit Earth some 466 million years ago. The cosmic crash — which took place between Mars and Jupiter and destroyed an asteroid some 93 miles (150 km) wide — created a thick plume of dust that sprea