Scientists have finally made a major breakthrough in discovering the origin of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs

I know what you're thinking: we already know that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs came from space.

About 66 million years ago, the chunk of space rock, about ten kilometers in diameter, hit the planet, leaving behind a crater that was more than ten times its size.

The impact would have crushed any living creature unfortunate enough to be near it, but the real cause of death was the enormous amount of material ejected into the atmosphere.

It helped dim the light of the sun on our planet and killed much of the plants and vegetation that depended on sunlight for survival.

Due to the reduced number of plants, the herbivores began to starve and the carnivorous dinosaurs that had hunted them also became extinct because there were not as many other dinos left to eat.

The asteroid ended human history after dinosaurs had dominated our planet for around 180 million years, so it's understandable why the idea of ​​something like that happening again scares us.

Imagine if everything we have built and developed as a species was wiped out by a giant chunk of space appearing out of nowhere.

Fortunately, we have developed methods to detect such asteroids approaching us long before they impact, and we have been working on ways to redirect them so that they miss us.

As far as we know, dinosaurs did not have such technology, so the crash of the large boulder into the dino world was quite a surprise.

Now there has been a scientific breakthrough regarding the origin of the asteroid, which tells us more about the origin of this planet killer.

This will have some impact on the local economy. (Getty Stock Photo)

In an interview with AFP, geochemist Mario Fischer-Godde from the University of Cologne spoke about a study on the origins of this gigantic asteroid.

He said: “With all this knowledge, we can now say that this asteroid originally formed beyond Jupiter.”

There are two main groups of asteroids: the C-type, which forms in the outer solar system, and the S-type, which comes from the inner solar system closer to the sun.

By studying the geological deposits at Chicxulub, the crater formed by the asteroid impact on Earth, experts have been able to learn more about the origins of the object and the consequences of its impact.

Most meteorites (rocks from asteroids) that land on our planet are S-type, so the fact that the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs had a different origin is very special.

Of course, it is difficult to imagine that dinosaurs were capable of appreciating such a fact.