They explain where the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs came from

Dublin. The impact of the Chicxulub meteorite changed Earth’s history forever 66 million years ago, causing the extinction of 75% of species, including dinosaurs, but where did it come from and how did it get to our planet?

This Monday, Nature magazine published a new theory developed by experts from Harvard University (USA) that could shed light on a catastrophic event that still raises many doubts.

In addition to its devastating consequences, it is known that the impact of that “asteroid or comet”, the authors say, left a crater in the Gulf of Mexico more than 180 kilometers in diameter and almost 20 deep.

To complete the puzzle, experts Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj claim, through statistical analysis and gravitational simulations, that a significant fraction of a type of comet originates in the Oort cloud – a sphere of space debris located at the edge of the solar system, deviated from its orbital path due to Jupiter’s gravitational field.

This force moved the comet to the sun, which in turn shattered it into several fragments, a phenomenon that increases the number of bodies that, like Chicxulub, can enter Earth’s orbit and fall to Earth once between 250 and 750 million years, approximately.

“Basically, Jupiter acts like a pinball machine. Jupiter propels these received comets (called long-period ones) into orbits that bring them very close to the sun, “Siraj said in a statement.

Because these long-lasting comets can take up to 200 years to orbit the sun, experts have called them “solar ruminants.”

“When we talk about these solar ruminants,” Siraj continues, “the important thing is not so much that they melt, which affects the total mass relatively little, but the fact that, being so close to the sun, the closest part of the comet it is subjected to a force of gravitational attraction greater than that which is farther away, which generates a tidal force ”.

This event, he points out, causes the large comet to break into smaller fragments and, when it leaves orbit, “there is a statistical probability that they will have an impact on Earth.”

Loeb and Siraj’s calculations suggest that the probability of long-lived comets impacting our planet is “a factor of about 10”, while indicating that up to 20% of them become “solar ruminants, according to other studies. astronomers.

They also state that the “new impact report” is consistent with the age of the Chicxulub crater, which provides a satisfactory explanation for its origin and other similar “impact comets”.

“What we’re proposing is that if you break an object when it’s close to the sun, it can lead to a series of appropriate events and also to the type of impact that wiped out the dinosaurs,” Loeb points out.