How Big Are Asteroids Destroying Dinosaurs? Page all

KOMPAS.com – The impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago was one of the worst Feminas that life on Earth has ever experienced.

An asteroid 9.6 km wide, called Chicxulub, hit the waters of what is now Mexico, triggering a mass extinction that killed more than 75 percent of the species on Earth.

Reported from National Geographic, Just then, an unexpectedly strong earthquake shook and rolled up the Earth’s crust.

A tsunami over 45 meters high hit the coast of North America.

In addition, forest fires raged hundreds of km away from the impact site.

Also read: Scientists find fossils of dinosaurs that died when an asteroid hit Earth

This is caused by the searing heat of the asteroid’s initial impact plume and the blast of debris that followed.

Reported from Space.com, Chicxulub Crater with a width of about 144 km and a depth of 20 km gives a rough idea of the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Harvard astrophysicists Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb have performed calculations and estimated that the incoming object may have been about 7 km wide.

However, it is assumed that the asteroid is part of a long-period comet.

Asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter orbit more slowly than long-period comets, so they would have to be larger to bore holes on Earth the size of Chicxulub.

Also read: How did the cockroaches survive the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs?

Thus, there are estimates that the asteroid is about 10 km in diameter.

What was it like asteroids that destroyed dinosaurs?

The Chicxulub Crater is one of the largest impact structures ever found on Earth.

Reported from BBC Sky at Night Magazine, it appears the crater was created by the asteroid carbonaceous chondrite (CC), a dark rock full of organic compounds.

This is surprising because impacts from objects of this kind are rare and they make up only 5% of all meteorites collected.

So, why one of the largest craters on Earth the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by this asteroid?

Also read: Megalosaurus, First Dinosaur Found

David Nesvorný and his colleagues at the Department of Space Studies, Southwest Research Institute, United States (US), have tried to unravel this mystery.

They built computer simulations of how the orbits of objects in the main asteroid belt could escape, becoming near-Earth asteroids that could potentially collide with our planet.

The model includes more than 42,000 asteroids more than 5 km wide in the main belt and how they are affected by influences such as solar radiation pressure or Jupiter’s gravity.

Experts calculate that Venus and Earth receive the same number of strikes from asteroids larger than 5 km.

Nesvorný found that about 6% of simulated Venus impactors had evolved into earlier retrograde orbits and hit the planet at a staggering 220,000 km/h.

Also read: After the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals grew in size to survive

Nesvorný and his colleagues found that because of the orbital dynamics involved, the smaller impactor (less than one kilometer in diameter) most likely originated from the inner edge of the asteroid belt and thus has a regular rocky composition.

However, the largest asteroids to hit Earth are more likely to have come from the middle or outer asteroid belt, where CC objects are more common.

They concluded that the asteroid that triggered the mass extinction 66 million years ago was a main belt asteroid that most likely came from beyond 2.5 AU.

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