Extraterrestrial events — the collision of faraway black holes, a comet slamming into Jupiter — evoke wonder on Earth but rarely a sense of local urgency. By and large, what happens in outer space stays in outer space.

A study published Wednesday in Science Advances offered a compelling exception to that rule. A team of researchers led by Birger Schmitz, a nuclear physicist at Lund University in Sweden, found that a distant, ancient asteroid collision generated enough dust to cause an ice age long ago on Earth. The study lends new insight to ongoing efforts to address climate change.

“We’ve shown that what happens in the solar system can have a big influence on Earth,” said Philipp Heck, a curator of meteorites at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and an author of the study. “Extraterrestrial events aren’t always destructive. Many people think about meteorites as just dinosaur killers, but we found the opposite. A big collision in the asteroid belt had constructive consequences that led to cooling and biodiversification.”

Earth is frequently exposed to extraterrestrial matter; 40,000 tons of the stuff settle on the planet every year, enough to fill 1,000 tractor-trailers. But 466 million years ago, a 93-mile-wide asteroid collided with an unknown, fast-moving object between Mars and Jupiter. The crash increased the amount of dust arriving on Earth for the next two million years by a factor of 10,000. Dr. Schmitz, Dr. Heck and their team found that the dust triggered cooling in Earth’s atmosphere that led to an ice age.