Stupid caption of the day. It had a little up arrow and everything.
The asteroid was large enough to kill off three-quarters of the life on earth. Photograph: Mopic/AlamyPhotograph? Really?
The asteroid? Really?
And the asteroid had a diameter of 6 miles. They've shown a retarded artists depiction of something with a diameter of at least 500 miles. You know - only
half a million to a million times more massive! It's at least half the size of the Earth's moon (an 8th of the mass). It's bigger than all but 15-20 of the 180+ moons in the solar system.
Haven't done the maths, but it'd be interesting to see if an asteroid that big with a flush impact would leave an exit wound on the other side of the planet. Only so much mass can be vaporised, and that is largely a function of the speed, not the mass. Mind you, if it was travelling at 10 km/s, that's 20 minutes to get through the Earth, ignoring the obvious energy dissipation on impact, and the resistance afterwards, probably not. Definitely punch through the crust though, and it'd be hard not to imagine magma covering huge portions of the Earth and huge amounts of matter being jettisoned into space- particularly given that at the point of impact, more than 99.9% of the mass of the asteroid would still be outside of the stratosphere. (Being that, again being too lazy to do the maths, it looks like it'd want to add, at a guess, 2kms of magma to the surface of the Earth, and compare that to 4km of water currently on 70% of the Earth surface and you have enough heat to boil the oceans dry, except no idea what would occur at the interface. Momentumwise it wouldn't do a ton to the Earth's orbit, but explosionwise, dunno - maybe something, but again maybe not.
Picture is massive. Not going to link it.
Article is here.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/dinosaur-asteroid-science-ocean-floorThe really stupid thing. A to scale picture would be FAR more impressive, not least because "the asteroid that wiped out 75% of life on Earth" would look like a grain of sand.
(Stupid me was thinking in diameter, but kept typing in radius. Edited.)
