14 DAY TRIAL // It is a common held belief that the dinosaurs' demise was brought about by the Earth's being hit by an asteroid. However, a new study claims that the dinosaurs all became extinct because of a comet.
The researchers who pieced together this new theory concerning how and why dinosaurs fell off the biodiversity map millions of years ago explain that, all things considered, there simply isn't enough debris lying around worldwide in order to support the claim that the Earth got hit by an asteroid.
Thus, it is their belief that the object that caused the 110 mile-wide (almost 180 kilometers) Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, Mexico to form was significantly smaller than previously estimated.
Furthermore, they are quite convinced that this object had to have been moving at an impressive speed.
These two assumptions concerning how the Chicxulub was formed led them to the conclusion that both the dinosaurs and several other hundred species were wiped out by a comet and not an asteroid.
According to Daily Mail, the lack of debris that these researchers are basing their theory on basically refers to the fact that the amounts of iridium-rich sediments supposedly left behind by the disintegration of an asteroid are actually smaller than previously assumed.
Therefore, the object that collided with our planet millions of years ago had to have been a comet.
“You'd need an asteroid of about 5km (roughly 3 miles) diameter to contribute that much iridium and osmium. But an asteroid that size would not make a 200km-diameter (about 125 miles) crater,” specialist Dr. Jason Moore from Dartmouth College told members of the press.
“So we said: how do we get something that has enough energy to generate that size of crater, but has much less rocky material? That brings us to comets,” Dr. Jason Moore went on to argue.
For those unaware, comets are made up of dust, ice and rocky particles, and what sets them apart from asteroids is the fact that they have so-called comas or Tails (i.e. a nebulous envelope that surrounds its nucleus and gives it a “fuzzy” appearance).