Earth’s most well-known killer asteroid got here from the outer reaches of the photo voltaic system, researchers report within the Aug. 16 Science.
About 66 million years in the past, an asteroid slammed into the ocean simply off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, forming the Chicxulub crater. That highly effective affect could have triggered a mass extinction occasion on Earth, killing off greater than 60 % of the planet’s species, together with all nonbird dinosaurs (SN: 1/25/17). The affect left geochemical fingerprints, similar to elevated ranges of the component iridium, in a skinny layer of rock present in a number of international locations across the globe (SN: 9/8/84).
Now, new chemical analyses of these rock layers, which mark the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene intervals (often called KPg), are serving to to create a forensic profile of the killer asteroid.
Geochemist Mario Fischer-Gödde of the College of Cologne in Germany and colleagues measured 5 isotopes, or varieties, of ruthenium within the KPg rock layers, in addition to in 5 affect craters that occurred between 36 million and 470 million years in the past and in Earth-based platinum ores (SN: 12/18/18).
Ruthenium, like iridium, is a platinum-group component, uncommon in Earth’s crust however considerable in asteroids and different area rocks. Nevertheless, the relative abundance of ruthenium isotopes varies amongst area objects relying on the place they originate.
The ruthenium signatures within the KPg rocks had been indistinguishable from each other, tying all of them to the identical occasion, the workforce discovered. And that occasion was positively extraterrestrial, not from ashfall as a consequence of intense volcanic eruptions which have additionally been implicated within the dinosaurs’ demise (SN: 9/28/23).
Most meteorites discovered on Earth are stony, or siliceous, asteroids, originating from the close by asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That belt was additionally the origin of the 5 non-Chicxulub impactors.
However the Chicxulub impactor was a carbonaceous asteroid, originating within the outer reaches of the photo voltaic system, from an historic asteroid belt past Jupiter (SN: 12/16/22). Now that’s far out.
