The impact that the dinosaurs wiped out and caused hell on earth began on the mysterious sides of the solar system, scientists said.
Scientists have long agreed that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the ‘Chicxulub impact’, which left a vast crater off the coast of Mexico that is about 200 kilometers deep.
They also agreed on the devastating horrors that would make the impact. It wiped out nearly three-quarters of life on earth, leaving the earth in endless night and an 18-month winter filled with fire raining from the sky.
But what was less clear is what the impact was actually caused. Scientists do not know whether the object was a comet or an asteroid where it originally came from, or how it hit the earth with such destructive power.
Answering the question sheds not only the end of the dinosaurs, but also the state of the solar system and our place in it, given the fear that we might also be hit by another mass extinction event.
New research – published today in the journal Scientific reports, and written by scientists, including Harvard’s Avi Loeb – trying to answer the question. By analyzing data about the objects flying around the solar system, as well as simulations of how gravity would push them around, they say they have found a way to explain how the earth was hit with such destructive force.
They suggest that the journey of the object that wiped out the dinosaurs began in the Oort cloud, a comet shell that sits at the edge of the solar system. A piece of comet is struck off course by Jupiter’s gravity, imagines them and sends it in the direction of the Sun, which breaks the rock into pieces.
“Actually, Jupiter serves as a kind of pinball machine,” says Siraj, an undergraduate student who worked with Professor Loeb on the paper. “Jupiter kicks these incoming long-term comets into orbits that bring them very close to the sun.”
Such comets took a lot of time to circumvent the sun, which gave them the name sunbreakers and lengthy commentary.
‘If you have this solar pasture, it’s not so much the melting that continues, it’s a fairly small fraction in relation to the total mass, but the comet is so close to the sun that the part that is closer to the sun, “feels stronger gravitational pull than the part that is further away from the sun, which causes a tidal force,” said Mr. Siraj said.
‘You get an event of tidal disruption, and these large comets that come very close to the sun break up into smaller comets. And basically, on the way out, there’s a statistical chance that these smaller comets will hit Earth. ”
This story stands in contrast to one of the other main theories about where the impact came from: that it was a much larger asteroid originating from the asteroid belt running between Jupiter and Mars.
The new article suggests that the object that begins its life in the Oort cloud is more feasible in a part of its composition. Research says research on the Chicxulub crater and other similar craters suggests that the objects that caused it are called relatively primitive objects, which are called carbonaceous chondrites.
The researchers say that the hypothesis can be tested with further study of the craters themselves, including similar ones on the moon.
When the Vera Rubin Observatory begins in Chile next year, scientists may also be able to see comets from a long time ago and see if they behave that way.
“We need to see smaller fragments coming to earth from the Oort cloud on a regular basis,” Professor Loeb said. “I hope we can test the theory by having more data on long-term comets, getting better statistics and maybe seeing evidence for some fragments.”