Sixty-six million years ago, a mountain-size asteroid slammed into Earth just off the coast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Here's everything we know about it ⬇️
The asteroid that did all this damage is long gone, almost entirely destroyed in its kamikaze strike. But scientists have been able to take its measure to some extent over the past few decades. Here's what we know about the famous dino-killer.A team led by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarezfor the K-T extinction in 1980, after noticing that 66-million-year old clays around the globe sport far more of the rare metal iridium than the layers above and below them.
What type of object slammed into Earth that fateful day 66 million years ago? Alvarez and his team suspected it was anIt's not unanimous, however; some researchers think a comet blasted out Chicxulub Crater. In a, for example, Harvard astrophysicists Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb argued that comets are the best match with the geochemical evidence, which indicates that the impactor had a carbonaceous chondrite composition.
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