OT Dinocide

This topic came up here recently, here's some new stuff:

http://www.physorg.com/news108218928.html

Breakup event in the main asteroid belt likely caused dinosaur extinction
65 million years ago


The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms
on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event
in the main asteroid belt.

A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and
Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid
(298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid,
creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub
crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found
on the Moon.

The team of researchers, including Dr. William Bottke (SwRI), Dr. David
Vokrouhlicky (Charles University, Prague) and Dr. David Nesvorny (SwRI),
combined observations with several different numerical simulations to
investigate the Baptistina disruption event and its aftermath. A particular
focus of their work was how Baptistina fragments affected the Earth and
Moon.

At approximately 170 kilometers in diameter and having characteristics
similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, the Baptistina parent body
resided in the innermost region of the asteroid belt when it was hit by
another asteroid estimated to be 60 kilometers in diameter. This
catastrophic impact produced what is now known as the Baptistina asteroid
family, a cluster of asteroid fragments with similar orbits. According to
the team's modeling work, this family originally included approximately 300
bodies larger than 10 kilometers and 140,000 bodies larger than 1
kilometer.

Once created, the newly formed fragments? orbits began to slowly evolve due
to thermal forces produced when they absorbed sunlight and re-radiated the
energy away as heat. According to Bottke, "By carefully modeling these
effects and the distance traveled by different-sized fragments from the
location of the original collision, we determined that the Baptistina
breakup took place 160 million years ago, give or take 20 million years."

The gradual spreading of the family caused many fragments to drift into a
nearby "dynamical superhighway" where they could escape the main asteroid
belt and be delivered to orbits that cross Earth?s path. The team's
computations suggest that about 20 percent of the surviving
multi-kilometer-sized fragments in the Baptistina family were lost in this
fashion, with about 2 percent of those objects going on to strike the
Earth, a pronounced increase in the number of large asteroids striking
Earth.

Support for these conclusions comes from the impact history of the Earth
and Moon, both of which show evidence of a two-fold increase in the
formation rate of large craters over the last 100 to 150 million years. As
described by Nesvorny, "The Baptistina bombardment produced a prolonged
surge in the impact flux that peaked roughly 100 million years ago. This
matches up pretty well with what is known about the impact record."

Bottke adds, "We are in the tail end of this shower now. Our simulations
suggest that about 20 percent of the present-day, near-Earth asteroid
population can be traced back to the Baptistina family."

The team then investigated the origins of the 180 kilometer diameter
Chicxulub crater, which has been strongly linked to the extinction of the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Studies of sediment samples and a meteorite
from this time period indicate that the Chicxulub impactor had a
carbonaceous chondrite composition much like the well-known primitive
meteorite Murchison. This composition is enough to rule out many potential
impactors but not those from the Baptistina family. Using this information
in their simulations, the team found a 90 percent probability that the
object that formed the Chicxulub crater was a refugee from the Baptistina
family.

These simulations also showed there was a 70 percent probability that the
lunar crater Tycho, an 85 kilometer crater that formed 108 million years
ago, was also produced by a large Baptistina fragment. Tycho is notable for
its large size, young age and its prominent rays that extend as far as
1,500 kilometers across the Moon. Vokrouhlicky says, "The probability is
smaller than in the case of the Chicxulub crater because nothing is yet
known about the nature of the Tycho impactor."

This study demonstrates that the collisional and dynamical evolution the
main asteroid belt may have significant implications for understanding the
geological and biological history of Earth.

As Bottke says, "It is likely that more breakup events in the asteroid belt
are connected in some fashion to events on the Earth, Moon and other
planets. The hunt is on!"

The article, "An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probable source of the
K/T impactor," was published in the Sept. 6 issue of Nature.

--
Gary Collard
SABR-L Moderator
gmcollard@xxxxxxxxx
http://sarcastipundit.blogspot.com/

R.I.P. Carter
.

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