They tell 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, however, where did it come from and how? came to our planet?

The journal Nature publishes this Monday 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 expose, 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 argue, through statistical analysis and gravitational simulations, that a significant fraction of a star type originated in the Oort cloud – a sphere of spatial rejection located on the margins of the Solar system, deviated from its orbital path due to Jupiter’s gravitational field.

This force moved the comet toward the sun, which in turn shattered it into more 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 ‘(game) machine. Jupiter pushes these incoming (so-called long-period) stars into orbits that are very close to them in the sun,” Siraj said in a statement.

Since these long-lived stars can take up to 200 years to orbit the sun, experts have termed them “solar ruminants.”

“When we talk about these solar ruminants continues Siraj-, the important thing is not so much that they melt, which affects relatively little to the total mass, but the fact that, being so close to the sun, the most near the star is subjected to a greater force of gravitational attraction than the farthest one, which generates a tidal force. “

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

Loeb and Siraj’s calculations suggest that the probability of long-term stars impacting our planet is “an environmental factor of 10″, while indicating that up to 20% of these become ” solar ruminants, in line with the studies of other astronomers.

They also claim that the “new impact ratio” is consistent with the age of the Chicxulub crater, which offers a satisfactory explanation for its origin and that of other similar “impact stars”.

“What we’re exposing is that if you break an object when it’s close to the sun, this can lead to a number of appropriate events and also the kind of impact that ended with the dinosaurs,” Loeb points out.