3 APRIL 2021 Life was trying, but it wasn't working out. As the Late Devonian period dragged on, more and more living things died out, culminating in one of the greatest mass extinction events our planet has ever witnessed, approximately 359 million years ago.
The culprit responsible for so much death may not have been local, scientists say. In fact, it might not have even come from our Solar System. Rather, a study published in August last year, led by astrophysicist Brian Fields from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, suggests this great extinguisher of life on Earth could have been a distant and completely foreign phenomenon – a dying star, exploding far across the galaxy, many light-years away from our own remote planet.