I'm currently reading a book by Jeremy Robinson of which the premise is that our solar system passes through some kind of massive interstellar cloud containing huge quantities of iron (in the form of snowflake-like flakes) that, to simplify a complicated story, hits the Earth and rains down like snow, becoming oxidized in the process, and ultimately removing all the oxygen in the lower atmosphere and wiping out millions of people by asphyxiation.

 

I was just wondering whether this idea even comes close to approximating being possible, or if along with some of Robinson's other ideas is pure fiction? Can anyone tell me?

I do not know the surround environmental condition of the current solar system well, but all particles do not come into the solar system.

Solar wind restricts some of them coming into the solar system.

Edited January 13, 201313 yr by alpha2cen

Interstellar gas clouds consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Iron content sounds like science fiction.

There's iron atmosphere's around the surfaces of super-dense objects like neutron stars, but that's about it, there's no observed iron cloud, a star would have to be a lot more massive than any other star ever before to leave that much vaporized iron that it could travel as a distinguishable object and not just fly out in all directions into the vacuum.

Actually I was wrong now that I think about it, A nebula; Nebulae are often hundreds of light years large, and the blue under infra-red telescopes often indicates iron, so actually there are clouds of iron, and they are created by stars almost incomprehensively large, but if we were caught in a nebula the iron wouldn't be the problem, it would be the radiation that get's absorbed and reflected from all the dust emitted from the parent star as well as shockwaves from the supernova that created it, or possibly the leftover thermal energy in the form of plasma that would strip away the atmosphere if the magnetic field isn't strong enough. Otherwise I'm sure there's random trace amounts of iron vapor traveling through space and entering Earth's atmosphere.

I'm surprised no one else caught this sooner, I would think there would be some astronomy expert looking at topics...

Edited January 15, 201313 yr by SamBridge

If the process were anything but very slow the heat released from the burning iron would be a problem before the lack of oxygen.