It was not a comet but an asteroid that killed the Earth’s dinosaurs. Scientists also told where it came from!

66 million years ago, a very large object collided with the Earth. The events that followed completely wiped out the dinosaurs from the Earth. But what was this object? This has been a subject of research and debate for a long time. In a new study, scientists have found out whether it was an asteroid or a comet? They have even found out where this object came from.

In a new research published recently, scientists say that it was actually an asteroid that formed in our solar system. And it came from beyond the planet Jupiter. The impact of this asteroid left a geochemical imprint, due to which high levels of the element iridium are seen in a thin layer of rock found in many countries around the world.

This event occurred in the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, also known as the KPG. Chemical analysis of these rock sediments is helping to create a forensic profile of the asteroid. The asteroid that caused the crater at Chicxulub in present-day Mexico was a C-type asteroid.

This new research contradicts earlier claims that it was a comet that hit Earth and destroyed the dinosaurs. Geochemist Mario Fischer-Gode of the University of Cologne in Germany, along with his colleagues, measured five types of ruthenium in the KPG rock layers. Ruthenium is a platinum-group element that is rarely found in the Earth’s crust, but is quite abundant in asteroids and other space rocks.

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Most meteorites found on Earth are siliceous, or stony, asteroids that formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This belt was also the home of five “asteroids that did not fall on Chicxulub”. But the one that fell on Chicxulub was a carbonaceous asteroid that originated in the outer reaches of the solar system, a place that is an ancient asteroid belt beyond Jupiter. “Now we can say with all this information, that this asteroid initially formed beyond Jupiter,” Fischer-Goode told AFP.

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