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Dinosaurs were wiped out of Earth more than 66 million years ago when an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter slammed into the planet. However, researchers have now discovered that it was a comet from the edge of the solar system that caused the devastation, not a nearby asteroid.
Jupiter was responsible for the long-distance comet smashing into our planet, and similar impacts can be expected every 250 million to 750 million years, a study says.
Amir Siraj, a Harvard student, co-authored the paper with Professor Avi Loeb and published it in Scientific Reports this week, rejecting older claims of the cataclysmic event.
Siraj told AFP that Jupiter acts as a kind of pinball machine that propels these long-period incoming comets into orbits that bring them very close to the sun.
The duo have developed a statistical model that showed that the probability of long-period comets hitting Earth is consistent with the age of Chicxulub and other known impactors.
His theory is: Jupiter’s gravity launched this incoming comet into an orbit that brought it very close to the sun, whose tidal forces caused the comet to break apart. Some of the comet fragments entered Earth’s orbit and one, 50 miles in diameter, about the size of Boston, crashed off the coast of Mexico, reports said.
Furthermore, another line of evidence in favor of his argument is the Chicxulub composition: only about one-tenth of all the asteroids in the Main Belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is made up of carbonaceous chondrite, while most of comets have it.
