Scientists have surprisingly claimed that the asteroid that collided with Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs was not alone.
According to a team from Heriot-Watt University, there was a second, smaller asteroid, known as a rare asteroid, which collided with the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.
The crater was first discovered in 2022 and could have been a “catastrophic event” that caused a tsunami at least 800 meters across the Atlantic Ocean.
Dr. Oysden Nicholson, who discovered the crater, believes the space rock caused a fireball as it entered Earth’s atmosphere.
He said: “Imagine the asteroid was hitting Glasgow and you were in Edinburgh, about 50 kilometers away. The fireball would be about 24 times larger than the size of the sun in the sky – enough to set fire to trees and plants in Edinburgh.”
The larger asteroid, which is usually credited with causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, landed in what is now Mexico and left a crater 180 kilometers wide.
Scientists cannot determine whether the smaller impact occurred before or after, but they believe it occurred in the same era.
The “Nadir” asteroid could have been at an altitude of between 400-500 meters, and would have hit the Earth at a speed of approximately 72 thousand kilometers per hour.
The violent impact at sea left a crater 9 kilometers deep and could have caused a large amount of water to emerge from the sea floor.
Dr Nicholson and his team hope to understand the impact better, and have begun analyzing high-resolution 3D data which they hope will show them the characteristics of the second asteroid.
“It reveals this crater in three dimensions for the first time – and it’s the first time we’ve been able to see inside an impact crater,” he told The Independent.
It is rare for a single asteroid, let alone two asteroids of this size, to collide with Earth in such a small time frame, as our location in the solar system provides a degree of protection from large space debris.
The closest humans have come to this magnitude of an event was the Tunguska Event in 1908 when a 50-meter asteroid exploded in the Siberian sky.
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