Is there any question that Saturn, with it's rings, is the coolest looking planet? So how wild would the earth be if it had rings?

Well, at one time that may have actually been true! A trio of scientists analyzed meteorite impact craters from around the world and now believe Earth once had a ring around it, chunks of which eventually rained down through the atmosphere—a discovery that could fundamentally alter how we think about the evolution of Earth’s climate.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound. Earth is actually notable for its lack of a ring system. Though Saturn’s rings are the most prominent, the researchers point out in the study that all of our solar system’s large planets have rings, though their composition varies. There’s also some evidence that Mars once had a ring of its own.

The researchers looked at both the chemical composition of the craters, which showed a disproportionate amount of material that is often found in L chondrite meteorites. It’s a sign that the material came from meteorites resulting from a single asteroid breaking up.

They also looked at the locations of the craters. Meteorites tend to fall randomly, but the majority of the impacts were centralized within 30 degrees of the equator. That’s pretty tough to explain as happenstance, given that 70% of the Earth’s crust lies outside this area. They determined the chances of the impacts being random were minuscule, at just 1 in 25 million.

“Over millions of years, material from this ring gradually fell to Earth, creating the spike in meteorite impacts observed in the geological record,” said Andy Tomkins, a professor at Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, who led the study, in a press release. “We also see that layers in sedimentary rocks from this period contain extraordinary amounts of meteorite debris.”

This new information opens up more questions than it answers, such as why/how these rings fell to earth, how it impacted the climate, and how it would have affected the limited life on earth at the time which was mostly aquatic.

But the next time you gaze up at the sky, just think about how amazing it would be to still see the rings around our blue planet!