Were The Dinosaurs Killed By A Comet?
About 66 million years a cataclysmic event took place that caused about three-quarters of all life on Earth to go exist. Usually, we think this was caused by an asteroid, but some scientists think it was something else.
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A new article published in the journal Scientific Reports comes with an alternative theory to the commonly assumed asteroid. Scientists from Harvard think the era of the dinosaurs was ended by a comet coming from the Oort cloud at the edge of our Solar system. In their theory, the comet was brought in because of Jupiter’s and Sun’s gravity.
The scientists are convinced that the Sun’s gravity brought fragments of a comet and one of the larger fragments, in the end, hit the Earth. That would disprove the original theory of the father and son Alvarez duo who analyzed the sedimentary layers and found unusually high iridium concentrations. Iridium is often found in asteroids.
The crater in the Yucatan peninsula was identified to be the most likely impact site back in the seventies and we assume the object was somewhere between 11 and 81 kilometers large. Its impact had a devastating impact on the global climate leading to a mass extinction event. This hypothesis only grew stronger when in 2016 scientists took samples from the crater's ring and analysis proved that the ground was subjected to immense pressure for a short time.
Amir Siraj – an astrophysicist from Harvard – is one of the creators of the new theory and he has done numerical calculations for comets with a long orbit. His search found that comets with a size of 10 – 60 kilometers can be torn by the Sun’s tidal forces into smaller fragments.
On top of that, he thinks that Jupiter’s gravitational field is strong enough to take these comets off their course in the Oort cloud and get them closer to the Sun. Then the Sun’s tidal forces break them and more fragments mean a higher chance that one will impact the Earth.
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