Some 66 million years ago, a huge asteroid, about 10-km-wide, hit the Earth. The huge asteroid hit the ground close to Mexico which additional made a 180-kilometre-diameter effect structure on the earth. The occasion resulted in a mass extinction occasion wiping out 75 per cent of all animal and plant species like non-avian dinosaurs from the planet.
With the assistance of a variety of findings on asteroid evolution and information extracted from identified asteroids, US group dug a small deeper into this pretty asteroid named Chicxulub (the one which destroyed dinosaurs)– like exactly where this asteroid came from, how typically such events have occured in the previous and other connected facts. The final results of the study have been published in Icarus last month.
Dr David Nesvorný, the lead author of the study, in a press release stated, “We decided to look for where the siblings of the Chicxulub impactor might be hiding.” The group had studied the major asteroid belt which is situated in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. NASA reveals, this belt is estimated to have in between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids bigger than 1 kilometre in diameter followed by millions of smaller sized ones.
With the assistance of pc models, the authors studied how objects escape from this belt. They noted how thermal forces can enable these objects to drift and how gravitational kicks from each the planets (Mars and Jupiter) can push the object into orbits close to the blue planet (Earth).
Over one hundred,000 such asteroids have been studied by the group with the assistance of NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer. The findings stated that 10-km-wide asteroids from the outer half of the asteroid belt can hit Earth as soon as every single 250 million years on an average– which is at least 10 instances more typically than previously calculated.
Dr. Simone Marchi, co-author of the study, stated “This result is intriguing not only because the outer half of the asteroid belt is home to large numbers of carbonaceous chondrite impactors, but also because the team’s simulations can, for the first time, reproduce the orbits of large asteroids on the verge of approaching Earth.”“Our explanation for the source of the Chicxulub impactor fits in beautifully with what we already know about how asteroids evolve,” he added.
“This work will help us better understand the nature of the Chicxulub impact, while also telling us where other large impactors from Earth’s deep past might have originated,” Dr Nesvorný added.