Life on Earth is wiped out every 27 million years – and we have about 16 million years left until the next extinction, according to scientists.

Research into so-called ‘extinction events’ for our planet over the past 500 million years  – twice as long as any previous studies  – has proved that they crop up with metronomic regularity.

Scientists from the University of Kansas and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC are 99 per cent confident that there are extinctions every 27 million years.

In the 1980s scientists believed that Earth’s regular extinctions could be the result of a distant dark twin of the Sun, called Nemesis. (Read More).