FINDING THE DINO-KILLING ASTEROID
Hurtling for billions of miles across the Solar System, a gigantic chunk of rock zipped past the planets until it collided with ours. But where did it come from, and how did it change the course of Earth’s history forever?
WORDS SCOTT DUTFIELD
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Around 66 million years ago, life on Earth was thriving. The
Cretaceous period culminated in land covered in lush forests rich
with biodiversity, including giant dinosaurs. Casting your eyes over the Cretaceous forests, you might have seen the heads of Titanosaurs poking over the canopy, apex predators such as
Tyrannosaurus rex chasing prey and the last flying reptiles, Pterosaurs, soaring in the sky. However, the dominion of the dinosaurs was brought to an abrupt end when a mountain-sized asteroid tore through Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the ocean. In mere moments, the fireball would have appeared in the sky and burned brighter than the Sun as it hurtled towards its eventual impact site in the Gulf of Mexico, today known as the Chicxulub crater.
DID YOU KNOW?
Carbonaceous chondrites make up five per cent of all meteorites collected
Most asteroids in our Solar System can be found orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in a region known as the asteroid belt. It’s estimated that there are up to 1.9 million asteroids almost a mile in diameter that reside here. As remnants of the Solar System’s formation 4.6 billion years ago, the asteroid belt is where the leftovers of these planet-building ‘bricks’ have fallen into orbit around the Sun. Occasionally, these space rocks are knocked by the gravitational pull of passing planets and flung out into other parts of the Solar System.