Life on Earth would probably have developed vastly differently without this cosmic coincidence
WASHINGTON - It was a turning point in the history of life on Earth . An asteroid an estimated 6-9 miles wide slammed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, triggering a global cataclysm that eradicated about three-quarters of the world's species and ended the age of dinosaurs .
The impactor, based on the debris composition, was a carbonaceous asteroid, or C-type, so named because of a high concentration of carbon. The study ruled out that the impactor was a comet or that the debris layer had been laid down by volcanism, as some had hypothesized. The clay layer is rich in metals including iridium, ruthenium, osmium, rhodium, platinum and palladium that are rare on Earth but common in asteroids.
"Ruthenium is especially useful in this context as the isotopic signature in the clay layer is almost entirely made up of ruthenium from the impactor and not the background sediment, and ruthenium shows distinct isotopic compositions between inner and outer solar system materials," said geoscientist and study co-author Steven Goderis of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
After forming in the outer solar system, the asteroid probably later migrated inward to become part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Fischer-Gödde said, before somehow being sent hurtling in the direction of Earth, perhaps due to a collision. The researchers analyzed samples from five other asteroid impacts dating from 37 million to 470 million years ago, finding that all were S-type, illustrating the rarity of a carbonaceous asteroid strike.
پاکستان تازہ ترین خبریں, پاکستان عنوانات
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