Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: asteroid/comet impacts

Researchers identify class of ‘oddball’ meteorite that killed the dinosaurs

A rare CO chondrite meteorite was the probable impacter that struck Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75% of Earth’s species, including nonavian dinosaurs. These findings are published in Science Advances. Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Paris, Brussels and Vienna, used advanced nickel isotope analysis of samples to narrow down the composition of the deadly Cretaceous-Paleogene meteorite.

“Carbonaceous chondrites of the Ornans class are definitely not like the typical meteors you find in museum collections,” says Dr. Philippe Claeys, who worked on the study as a visiting professor at UBC.

“A CO contains much less volatile elements—like carbon, zinc, water and particularly sulfur—than other classes of meteorites we’ve discovered so far on Earth. It doesn’t alter our theory of what caused the extinction event—but it makes it less likely that sulfur contained in the impacter was the smoking gun. The fine debris thrown into the atmosphere would have been the primary factor.”

Alien world chemistry found inside meteorite that struck New Jersey home

On July 16, 2024, a daytime meteor shook New York City with a sonic boom as it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty. Now, an international team of researchers reports in the journal Science Advances that a short time later, a meteorite weighing more than 2 pounds crashed through the roof of a house in the town of Hillsborough, New Jersey.

“A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids—a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world,” said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

On that day, a rock the size of a heavy airline bag entered Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 32,000 miles/h (14.4 kilometers per second). Sixty observers from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania reported seeing the meteor to the American Meteor Society, while 16 in New York and New Jersey felt the shock wave.

Asteroid breakup may explain inner solar system bombardment 800 million years ago

A Southwest Research Institute-led study has proposed a connection between a specific collision in the main asteroid belt and an inner-solar-system-wide bombardment episode that may have had measurable biological and geological consequences on Earth. The research suggests that the catastrophic breakup of the Eulalia parent body could be linked to an impact shower that struck the terrestrial planets about 800 million years ago. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

“The role impacts have played in shaping the origin and evolution of life in our solar system is poorly understood,” said Dr. William Bottke, an executive director in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. He also directs the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE), SwRI’s team in NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, and is lead author of a paper describing this research. “The heavily cratered surface of the moon serves as a reminder of the large impacts in Earth’s past, but so far, only the Chicxulub impact event 66 million years ago has been strongly linked to a specific effect on life, namely the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.”

Finding geological evidence of impacts older than 650 million years ago on Earth is challenging because of the constant renewal of our home planet’s surface. Earth’s landscape constantly changes as constructive forces such as volcanoes and plate tectonics build it up, while destructive forces such as weathering wear it down. One way researchers have searched for clues about Earth’s past is to study asteroid shower events.

NASA’s Lucy finds a wobbling peanut-shaped asteroid with signs of ancient water

A bizarre wobbling asteroid revealed by NASA’s Lucy mission is exposing hidden clues about ancient water, cosmic collisions, and the origins of the solar system. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped relic born from a violent collision and slowly reshaped by the subtle force of sunlight. It also carries traces of ancient water, making it an important clue to the solar system’s mysterious past.

Even relatively small asteroids can have surprisingly eventful histories. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft recently revealed that asteroid Donaldjohanson is a wobbling, peanut-shaped object that has been shaped by collisions, sunlight, and even a brief encounter with liquid water long ago.

The asteroid formed about 155 million years ago when fragments from a violent collision gradually came together. Since then, a subtle but persistent force generated by sunlight has altered its rotation, while traces of ancient water remain preserved in its rocky surface.

Young disk around WRAY 15–1880 may contain a primitive planetary system

Italian astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to perform polarimetric observations of the star WRAY 15–1880 and its young circumstellar disk. Results of the new observations, presented June 10 on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that this disk may host a primitive planetary system.

Circumstellar disks are accretion disks orbiting stars, composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids or collision fragments. Around the youngest stars, they are the reservoirs of material out of which planets may form.

At a distance of some 492 light-years from Earth, WRAY 15–1880 (also known as RX J1842.9–3532) is a solar-type classical T Tau star in the CrA-North subregion of the Corona Australis (CrA) complex. It has a mass of around 1.24 solar masses and is estimated to be 2.8 million years old.

Dino-killing asteroid may have fueled underground life for 8 million years

The asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected.

The finding has surprised the international team of researchers behind it, who came to their conclusions by pairing sophisticated new analysis of samples taken from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico with computer modeling of the geological effects of the asteroid impact that formed the crater 66 million years ago.

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, casts new light on how life may have first been incubated in hydrothermal systems in the earliest chapters of Earth’s history and could help direct the search for life on other planets.

Discovery of stromatolite formation in post-impact hydrothermal lacustrine environments and its implications for early Earth

Stromatolites within the Hapcheon impact crater suggest that asteroid impacts created hydrothermal oases fostering early life and habitability, according to geochemical, isotopic, and microbial analyses from the Hapcheon crater lake in Korea.

/* */