Dinosaurs doomed by steep asteroid
The killer space rock hit at its most destructive angle
The asteroid which killed the dinosaurs struck Earth at the deadliest angle possible, according to a recent set of simulations.
Around 66 million years ago, a giant meteor impacted Earth releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide, water and sulphur into the atmosphere, creating a nuclear winter and killing off 75 per cent of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. By combining geological data from the resulting Chicxulub crater and simulations of the strike, planetary scientists have determined the asteroid came in towards Earth at a steep angle, around 60˚.
“We know that this was among the worst case scenarios for the lethality on impact, because it put more hazardous debris into the upper atmosphere and scattered it everywhere – the very thing that led to a nuclear winter,” says Gareth Collins, from Imperial College London, who led the study. www.imperial.ac.uk
Asteroid with a tail found
An asteroid with a cometlike tail has been spotted near the orbit of Jupiter by the ATLAS Telescope. It’s thought the space rock contains water ice, which was recently disturbed to produce the tail. It is one of a growing number of crossover objects, bridging the gap between asteroids and comets.
Telescope renamed after NASA pioneer
Infrared telescope WFIRST has been renamed in honour of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who died in 2018. Known as the ‘mother’ of the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman spent much of her career advocating for new tools to allow astronomers to explore the Universe.
Nearest exoplanet confirmed
The presence of a planet around our nearest star, Proxima b, has been independently verified by the European Southern Observatory’s ESPRESSO instrument. The observations found the planet is around 1.2 times the mass of the Earth and orbits every 11.2 days.