Giant Space Collision tagged posts

Artist’s rendering of the space collision 466 million years ago that gave rise to many of the meteorites falling today. Credit: © Don Davis, Southwest Research Institute.

466 million years ago, there was a giant collision in outer space. Something hit an asteroid and broke it apart, sending chunks of rock falling to Earth as meteorites since before the time of the dinosaurs. But what kinds of meteorites were making their way to Earth before that collision? In a new study in Nature Astronomy, scientists have tackled that question by creating the first reconstruction of the distribution of meteorite types before the collision. They discovered that most of the meteorites we see today are rare, while many meteorites that are rare today were common before the collision.

Philipp Heck of The Fie...