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Massachusetts (United States) – 66 million years ago, a huge body collided with planet Earth, causing many aspects of life to become extinct, including dinosaurs, and the prevailing belief was that this object was an asteroid, but a new theory suggested that it was in fact an asteroid. part of a comet from the far reaches of the solar system.
The recent study, published by the journal “Scientific Reports”, estimated the size of the large piece to be about seven kilometers, indicating that it was caused by the explosion of an Oort cloud comet, a “cloud debris “located very far from the limits of the solar system.
Before the comet partially collided with what is known today in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at Chicxulub, it was pushed towards the sun by gravity from Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.
Lead author of the study, Amir Serraj, an astrophysics student at Harvard University, explained that Jupiter in this case behaves “like a game of pinball” or “pinball” and sends comets described as “to long range “to” orbits that make them very close to the sun. “And when comets are exposed to the sun’s tremendous gravitational pull,” the larger ones explode and break down into over 1,000 fragments. “
Serraj added that these fragments, which could project one of them towards the ground, “are likely to be large enough to cause an event similar to the one which led to the annihilation of the dinosaurs.” To reach this conclusion, the two scientists who conducted the study ran a gravity simulation using data available on the Oort cloud and the movement of the planets.
Saraj noted that “asteroids are dry rocks in the solar system” that are slower than comets, which are often compared to “dirty snowballs or icy rocks on the outskirts of the solar system”. This ice, warmed by the sun, forms comet tails visible in the sky.
The most popular theory to date was that the object that led to the disaster 66 million years ago originated from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But study co-author Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University said the frequency of these asteroids colliding with Earth “at least ten times lower” than that which allows them to collide with the planet.
Saraj noted that “the frequency of asteroids colliding with Earth is slightly higher (than the frequency of comets)”, so there is a tendency to attribute the extinction of dinosaurs to her, but what has not been taken into account is that the explosion of comets produces a large amount of flying fragments. “Our theory shows that more massive comet fragments may be a more compelling reason for this rate,” he said.
There is another proof which falls within the realm of the two worlds theory, namely that the Chiccholub crater, as is known, resulted from an object made of carbon chondrite. It is known that only around 10% of asteroids store this component, while some evidence indicates that it is more abundant in comets.
The professor revealed that the new Vera Rubin Observatory telescope, which is expected to start operating next year in Chile, could enable gravimetric monitoring of comets. He explained that this question “will be very important, because it will allow to develop expectations for the next hundred years which will allow us to know if something bad can happen to the planet”.
Calculations by the study’s authors showed that part of a comet can strike Earth at a rate of hundreds of millions of years, and so there is no risk of this happening in the short term. especially in relation to asteroids.
Nonetheless, Loeb stressed that these calculations are based only on statistical data, and therefore “may never be known” when the next comet fragment collides with Earth.
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