New Data Suggests Baptistina Asteroid Not Responsible For Dinosaur Extinction

The theory of which asteroid was responsible for killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has been shattered to pieces — literally. New data from NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) satellite suggests that an asteroid from the Baptistina family was actually not — as previously thought — responsible for the mass extinction, NASA reported on Monday. “As a result of the WISE science team’s investigation, the demise of the dinosaurs remains in the cold case files,” Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Observation Program at NASA, said in a statement. The Baptistina theory was originally published in the journal Nature in 2007. From NASA: According to that theory, Baptistina crashed into another asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter about 160 million years ago. The collision sent shattered pieces as big as mountains flying. One of those pieces was believed to have impacted Earth, causing the dinosaurs’ extinction. Using the infrared-sensitive telescope on the WISE, scientists analyzed the sunlight reflected off of over 1,000 asteroids in the Baptistina family. They found that the Baptistina asteroid actually broke up 80 million years ago, not 160 million years ago as researchers had thought. From NASA: “This doesn’t give the remnants from the collision very much time to move into a resonance spot, and get flung down to Earth 65 million years ago,” said Amy Mainzer, a co-author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal and the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Calif. “This process is thought to normally take many tens of millions of years.” Resonances are areas in the main belt where gravity nudges from Jupiter and Saturn can act like a pinball machine to fling asteroids out of the main belt and into the region near Earth. Scientists still believe that an asteroid hitting Earth 65 million years ago was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, but now they’re less sure of where exactly it came from. “We are working on creating an asteroid family tree of sorts,” Joseph Masiero, the lead author of the study said. “We are starting to refine our picture of how the asteroids in the main belt smashed together and mixed up.” NASA’s WISE was launched in 2009 to map the entire sky. It is currently hibernating after mapping the sky twice, according to NASA. Click here for some of the amazing images that the WISE spacecraft has sent back.

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New Data Suggests Baptistina Asteroid Not Responsible For Dinosaur Extinction

Posted by on September 20, 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.