The cause of the global cataclysm about 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of dinosaurs, many species of animals and plants, could not have been an asteroid that rammed the Earth. Astronomers of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute write about this in Scientific Reports, proposing their hypothesis.
In science for 2021, it is believed that the disaster led to the formation of the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico: its approximate diameter is about 180 km, and the initial depth is up to 20 km. Scientists believe it was an asteroid about 10 km in diameter that fell at a speed of 22 km / s. The impact energy was ~ 100 teratons in TNT equivalent, and the consequences led, according to the Alvarez hypothesis, to the mass extinction of species, including dinosaurs.
Meanwhile, according to the calculations of the authors of the new study, it was not an asteroid that fell on our planet, but a fragment of a long-period comet.
Jupiter’s gravity deflects the trajectories of many comets from the Oort Cloud (a hypothetical spherical region far beyond the orbits of the outer planets) as they fly into the inner solar system. When approaching the Sun, about a fifth of comets are subjected to tidal forces that break them into fragments.
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Astronomers carried out gravitational simulations and, after statistical analysis, stated that there is a good chance that a comet fragment on its way back to the Oort Cloud could collide with the Earth.
Using this knowledge and the fact that the Chicxulub samples suggest that the fallen object is from carbonaceous chondrites, the researchers conclude that it was probably a fragment of a comet. Indeed, only about 5% of asteroids between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars have a comparable composition, while many long-period comets consist of C-chondrites.
The authors summarize the fact that long-period comets that travel around the Sun in about 200 years, probably collide with our planet every 250-730 million years. Their calculations give almost ten times the risk of collision than the estimate so far accepted.
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