• Question: How big was the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs?

    Asked by wage49hut on 26 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Lara Codeca

      Lara Codeca answered on 26 Nov 2020:

      Hello! I had no idea and I had to google it!

      You can find the full story of it on Wikipedia, and this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater seems well written with plenty of references and bibliography.

      There it says that “the Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11–81 kilometers (6.8–50.3 mi)”.

    • Photo: Danny Hnatyshin

      Danny Hnatyshin answered on 26 Nov 2020:

      It was probably around 10km or so across, so bigger than Mount Everest! It caused the extinction because it was moving so fast (maybe around 20 km /s) which means it had a lot of energy!

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