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The space rock that doomed the dinosaurs was shrapnel from a comet that flew too close to the sun, a Harvard study suggests
The origin of the space rock that killed the dinosaurs has been a mystery. A new study suggests it wasn't an asteroid, but a comet fragment.
Science & Tech
About 66 million years ago, a space rock more than 6 miles wide collided with Earth, striking land that is now part of Mexico.
The impact sparked wildfires that stretched for hundreds of miles, triggered a mile-high tsunami, and released billions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. That gaseous haze blocked the sun, cooling the Earth and dooming the dinosaurs, along with 75% of all life on the planet.
But the origins of that dinosaur-killing rock, named Chicxulub, have remained a mystery.
Most theories suggest Chicxulub was a massive asteroid; hundreds of thousands of these rocks sit in a donut-shaped ring between Mars and Jupiter. But in a study published Monday, two Harvard astrophysicists suggested an alternate idea: that Chicxulub wasn't an asteroid at all, but a piece of shrapnel from an icy comet that had been pushed too close to the sun by Jupiter's gravity.
Asteroids and comets are both classified as space rocks by NASA, but they differ in key ways: Comets form from ice and dust outside our solar system and are generally small and fast-moving, whereas rocky asteroids are larger, slower, and form closer to the sun.
"We are suggesting that, in fact, if you break up an object as it comes close to the sun, it could give rise to the appropriate event rate and also the kind of impact that killed the dinosaurs," Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Harvard University and co-author of the new study, said in a press release.