Major media attention in top 5% of all Altmetric research for our new paper published today in Science: with a team of international colleagues, using Ruthenium isotopes to show that the large meteorite that doomed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago came from the far end of the Solar System, way beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
By investigating the isotope composition of the platinum metal ruthenium in samples from the K-Pg boundary layer, it is clear that the composition of the Chicxulub asteroid impactor is same as that of carbonaceous meteorites, which are fragments of carbonaceous (C-type) asteroids that originally formed in the external part of the Solar System.
Professor Mario Fischer-Gödde at the university of Cologne is the first author of the paper, with AMGC-VUB Professors Steven Goderis and Philippe Claeys contributing to the work
For comparison, ruthenium isotope compositions of other terrestrial craters and ejecta layers of various ages in the geological record show that within the last 500 million years the dominant compositions of bodies impacting on Earth were fragments of stony (S-type) asteroidst that formed within the inner solar system, between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt. The impact of a C-type asteroid such as the Chicxulub impactor appears to be a rare and so far unique event in geological history, with a projectile originating at the very outskirt of the Solar System, formed the 200 km Chicxulub crater and sealing the fate of the dinosaurs.
Read paper here - Check out Altmetric here, and check out VUB Press release (in Dutch)
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