When the Chicxulub asteroid slammed into Earth, it set off a chain of planet-wide devastation. New research suggests we should blame Jupiter.
An illustration of the large asteroid collision with Earth that may have led to the death of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.Around 66 million years ago, a rock over 6 miles wide collided with Earth, triggering the mass extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs and leaving a giant impact crater off the coast of Mexico, which to this day contains clues to the cataclysmic event. However, little has been known about where the space rock came from and what it was made of.
The study suggests that the asteroid may have formed farther out in the solar system and migrated toward the inner solar system due to a disturbance of the orbits of the outer planets. Before settling into its position as the fifth planet from the Sun,, traveling toward the center of the solar system, then back out again, and at some point coming as close as Mars. Jupiter may have stopped migrating toward the Sun because of Saturn’s gravitational field.
Ruthenium is one of the rarest metals on Earth, originally formed within ancient stars before making its way into the building blocks of planetary objects across the universe. The element was buried deep within Earth, way before the dinosaur-killing impact. Finding ruthenium in the Chicxulub crater samples eliminates other meteorite types and supports the hypothesis that the Chicxulub asteroid came from the outer reaches of the solar system.
The researchers behind the new study say these huge asteroid impacts are less likely today, under the current, more stable conditions of the solar system. “So the good news is, there are not many bodies straying around wildly in our solar system,” Fischer-Gödde said. “Everything is in a stable configuration; there would have to be some kind of disturbance, like a collision, to produce an Earth-crossing asteroid.
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