About a million 66 million years ago, rocks in space more than 6 miles wide collided with Earth, the land that is now part of Mexico.
The impact sparked wildfires that spread hundreds of miles, triggering a mile-high tsunami and releasing billions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. That gaseous dew cooled the earth and roamed the dinosaurs with 75% of the Earth’s life.
But the origin of that dinosaur-killing rock called Chiksulab has remained a mystery.
Most theories suggest that Chixulab was a giant planet; These thousands of rocks sit in a donut-shaped ring between Mars and Jupiter. But in a study published Monday, two Harvard astrophysicists suggested an alternative idea: that Chiksulab was not a planet, but a fragment of ice from a icy comet being pushed closer to the sun by the ice’s gravity.
Both asteroids and comets have been classified by NASA as celestial rocks, but they differ in the main ways: Comets form out of ice and dust outside our solar system and generally move smaller and faster, while rocky asteroids are larger, slower, and Forms nearby. Sun:
“We’re suggesting that, in fact, if you smash an object object closer to the sun, it could also increase the proper incidence rate and dinosaur-killing type effect,” said Loib, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Harvard University and co The author, stated in a press release.
The solar system works like a ‘pinball machine’ for comets
Most asteroids come from the asteroid belt between the inner and outer planets of the solar system. But NASA scientists who keep tabs on space objects passing close to the Earth have not yet been able to find out where Chiksulab came from.
In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, Loeb and his co-author, Amir Siraj, suggest that Chiksulab did not come from the planet’s belt. , Latanu, they say it happened in an area outside our solar system called the area cloud.
Think of the orchard cloud as a ring made up of 1 trillion pieces of icy debris, reaching far beyond the surrounding solar system. It is located at least 2,000 times farther from the sun than the earth. Comets that originate in the Ort Cloud are known as long-term comets because they take a long time to complete one orbit around the Sun.
But these comets can sometimes be pulled by the gravity of huge planets like Jupiter. Such a tweak in a comet’s orbit could damage it on a path very close to the sun.
The solar system acts as a kind of pinball machine, Siraj said in the release.
Comets that come close to the sun are called “suznagrasers”. A new study calculates that about 20% of cloud cloud comets are Sangrazars. As they get closer to our star, its gravity starts pulling them closer. The fragments of the comet close and focus on nearby planets.
This, the study authors say, is a “satisfactory explanation for the origin of the effect” that led to the killing of the dinosaurs.
The asteroid-versus-comet argument is not a compromise
Siraj and Loeb are not the only scientists who believe in comets, not asteroids but doomsday dinosaurs. A group of researchers at Dartmouth College Ledge similarly suggested in 2013 that a high-speed comet would have created a chicksulb pit.
Chiksulub hit the Earth at a speed of 12 seconds per second (43,200 miles), which is 30 times faster than the speed of a supersonic jet. The resulting 100-mile-wide crater extends 12 miles into the ths depths of the Gulf of Mexico. Some scientists have estimated that the power of the asteroid was equivalent to the 10 billion atomic bombs used in World War II.
But, all the researchers are convinced that the comet caused that destruction.
Natalia Artemieva, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, told The New York Times that the comet fragments would have been too small to make a Chingsulab crater. And Bill Botke, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, suggested that the study overestimates the frequency of the Sungrass – and as a result, the proportions of the fragments it makes comets.
Botte told the Times that the current evidence suggests that Chiksulab was a planet, which favors the idea. “There’s still room to move if someone wants to be a comet. I think it’s really hard to make that case.”
Siraj and Loeb, however, said their theory was supported by a type of material found in the Chikzulab pit and other pits in South Africa and Kazakhstan. That substance, carbonaceous chondrite, could come from comets. While only 10% of the asteroid belt is made up of asteroid carbonaceous chondritis, this material could be “potentially widespread in comets,” the study authors wrote.
The only specimens ever collected from a comet in space were brought back in 2006. They revealed that the carbon object known as Wild 2 was made of carbonaceous condensate.
Finding the right answer in a chicksulab discussion is useful as it can help researchers assess the likelihood of a similar effect occurring in the future. According to one study, only two to three comets from the cloud have hit Earth, according to one study. In contrast, according to the Planetary Society, chicksulb-sized asteroids affect the Earth every 100 million years.
Siraj and Loeb modeled how long-term comets get closer to the sun to drop large pieces in the direction of the earth. Their numbers suggest that 10 times more chic-sulb-sized objects hit the Earth in its history than scientists previously thought.
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