According to Sci-News, two interesting new studies have identified the "portraits" of the three main culprits that specialize in attacking the Earth with meteorites.

As many previous studies have shown, a group of meteorites called chondrites accounts for about 80% of the meteorites that have ever hit the Earth, mainly L-chondrite and H-chondrite.

These two types of meteorites alone account for 70% of the space rocks Earth has ever suffered, including the one that triggered the devastating ice age 466 million years ago.

In the first study led by Dr. Michael Marsset from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the argon isotope dating method determined that all L-chondrite meteorites that fell to Earth had a common origin.

It was an asteroid that collided with another object at supersonic speed about 450-470 million years ago and scattered its debris everywhere, including falling to Earth.

This event formed the Massalia meteorite family and provided the debris that fueled the incoming meteorite stream.

Meanwhile, a second study led by Dr. Miroslav Brož from Charles University (Czech) showed that all L-chondrite and H-chondrite meteorites were related to three space object fragmentations about 5.8; 7.6 and 40 million years ago.

Of these, the two more recent were caused by asteroids in the Karin and Koronis families, while the 40 million year event involved an older Massalia asteroid.

This 40 million year old object could very well be part of the 450-470 million year old object that the first study pointed to.

All of these objects reside in the Asteroid Belt region, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

"Our findings provide insight into the mysteries surrounding the origins of the most common meteorites that have impacted Earth and how those impacts may have shaped Earth's history," said Dr Brož and his colleagues.

The above studies have just been published in two scientific journals, Nature and Astronomy & Astrophysics.