2024-08-16 21:16:19
66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Researchers now know where the celestial body came from.
The asteroid responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs originated beyond Jupiter – and thus much further away than previously thought. Scientists have discovered this, disproving a popular theory that the celestial body was a comet that came from the inner solar system – more precisely, from the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
“Our data indicate that the Chicxulub impact body was a carbonaceous asteroid that formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter.” This is what the scientists, working under the direction of Cologne researcher Mario Fischer-Gödde, wrote in their study published on “science.org”.
The impact of the asteroid on Earth around 66 million years ago created the so-called Chicxulub crater, which has a diameter of around 180 kilometers and is located north of the Yucatán Peninsula in North America. Deposits from the impact can still be found worldwide in layers of earth that were formed at that time.
The researchers compared the ruthenium isotopes contained in the deposits from this period with those of other known meteorite impacts from the millions of years before and after the Chicxulub event.
Their result: The celestial body that was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs must have been a so-called carbonaceous chondrite – these are asteroids that contain a particularly high amount of carbon and formed in the outer solar system beyond the orbit of Jupiter. The ruthenium concentration in the samples indicated this.
The composition of the other deposits, however, showed structures that were more consistent with asteroids “that formed closer to the sun,” the researchers write. Carbonaceous chondrites are rare there.
But how did the asteroid get from so far out to Earth? Asteroid researcher Simone Marchi from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder told the journal “science.org”: Simulations showed that gravitational shocks from planets can occasionally tear carbonaceous asteroids away from the edge of the solar system and transport them into the inner solar system.
Asteroids the size of the Chicxulub celestial body, with a diameter of about 10 kilometers, came close to Earth approximately every few hundred million years.
However, the theory of a killer comet from the inner solar system has not yet been completely refuted. According to Cologne researcher Fischer-Gödde, a space mission to collect samples from a comet could help. This is probably the only way to finally clarify where the celestial body that was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs came from.