Scientists find origin of asteroid that killed the dinosaurs – and another one could be on its way

Chicxulub events are ten times more likely to occur than scientists had estimated

Astronomers believe that they have discovered the origin of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The six mile-wide asteroid which struck the Earth 66 million years ago and ended the 180 million year-long reign of the dinosaurs, was the cause of what is known as a Chicxulub events. It landed in what is now the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and formed the Chicxulub crater.

Scientists had examined the remains of the ancient rock through the samples on the Earth and within drill cores, which revealed that the debris came from a carbonaceous chondrite class of meteorites – some of the most pristine material in the entire solar system.

These meteorites comprise about three per cent of all meteorites that fall to Earth, but their name is something of a misnomer; while they were originally assumed to be rich in carbon, only two per cent of their makeup is carbon.

They commonly make up many of the mile-wide asteroids that approach the Earth, but none today are close to the sizes needed to produce an impact of the same scale as Chicxulub.

“To explain their absence, several past groups have simulated large asteroid and comet breakups in the inner solar system, looking at surges of impacts on Earth with the largest one producing Chicxulub crater,” said Dr. William Bottke, a co-author on a paper about this finding.

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“While many of these models had interesting properties, none provided a satisfying match to what we know about asteroids and comets. It seemed like we were still missing something important.”

What they discovered was that debris escaping the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, and specifically debris with a diameter greater than six miles, hit the Earth once every 250 million years – ten times more often than scientists previously thought.

Thermal forces mean these objects can drift into dynamical ‘escape hatches’, the scientist say, where the gravitational kicks of planets can shunt them into orbits closer to the Earth.

The researchers used Nasa’s Pleaides Supercomputer to monitor 130,000 model asteroids, tracking their progress over hundreds of millions of years.

“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,” said co-author Dr. Simone Marchi.

“Our explanation for the source of the Chicxulub impactor fits in beautifully with what we already know about how asteroids evolve.”