A new study from UCLA tries to prove that a slight shift in the orbit of several planets shifted a large asteroid from its orbit towards Earth. Critics claim that there are coincidences here, and that a comet is the one that hit the Earth 65 million years ago
By Avi Blizovsky
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago could have been caused by an astronomical shock in the inner solar system that affected the orbits of the Earth and even Mercury, according to a new theory proposed by a group of scientists from California.
Scientists have estimated for several years that a celestial body collided with the Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula in present-day Mexico. The impact, known to scientists as KT, caused dust to be thrown into the atmosphere, resulting in darkness that killed the vegetation that many dinosaurs relied on as a source of food.
According to the accepted theory, the dinosaurs simply starved to death.
But it was not clear until today if the object that hit the Earth was a comet or an asteroid. Using satellite models, UCLA scientists Bruce Rogar, Michel Gill and researcher Franz Varadi were able to trace the planets' orbits back 250 million years.
"We had a surprise," says Varadi, "the original goal of the project was to collect better data on the orbits of the planets in order to better understand the consequences of changes in them on the Earth's climate." During the Cretaceous period, gravitational pushes and pulls from the Sun and the other planets created oscillations in the Earth's orbit, the UCLA model claims. The oscillations, in their content, might have also caused shocks in the orbit of the planet Mercury. Gravitational effects of two celestial bodies could have caused a large asteroid to break away from the asteroid belt and crash into Earth. Claimed in the study.
According to the hypothesis there are thousands of asteroids in the solar system ranging from the size of a small rock to entire mountains. Most of them float in the central asteroid belt, an elliptical plane located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Mark Bailey, director of Mitzpe. Armagh in Northern Ireland says he too has researched what might have hit the planet and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
"I'm skeptical of this theory," Bailey said. "It seems to me to be a very, very long chain of hypotheses." But Bailey says he cannot rule out the theory as a whole.
"It is true that the theory is the result of hypotheses", says Varadi. "But something definitely happened to the orbit of Mercury, and it is very difficult to ignore the coincidence that such an event happened at the same time as the impact of the ". KT Bailey says that it was almost certainly a comet, not an asteroid, that hit the Earth 65 million years ago. Unlike asteroids, comets are clumps of debris constantly moving through space in very extreme orbits.
However, Varadi, a researcher in the field for 20 years who emigrated from Hungary, says that if he had to guess whether the object that hit the Earth was a comet or an asteroid, he would have chosen the asteroid theory. "This will give a new direction to research" said Varadi, who added that the discovery may attract good researchers to the field who will continue to confirm the new theory.
