Sentences with phrase «ago by an asteroid»

About 1,100 miles across and nearly five miles deep, it was formed about 3.5 billion years ago by an asteroid impact.

Not exact matches

Humanity - the greatest destroyers the planet has seen since it got its ass royaly kicked by an asteroid 68 million years ago.

That's because they may have been created by an exploding star and delivered to Earth by an asteroid billions of years ago.

A team led by experts at Cardiff University has provided new evidence to explain why deep sea creatures were able to survive the catastrophic asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago.

Many scientists currently believe that the mass extinction of life on Earth around 65m years ago was caused by a 110km - wide asteroid that hit Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

Some scientists suspect that nitrogen gas existed on Mars, but was blasted away by asteroid impacts billions of years ago.

By aggregating the sizes of the modern dark asteroids, researchers suggest the original dark planetesimals formed about 4 billion years ago, making this one of the oldest asteroid families in the main belt; most asteroid families are thought to have formed about 1 billion years ago.

Almost nothing is known about the dinosaurs that lived in Africa at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, just before they were wiped out by the impact of a giant asteroid.

«We're inside of a big hole in the ground — a crater created by an asteroid 4 billion years ago — and for some reason there's a giant mountain in the middle,» Bell says.

All families have their rocky patches, but a new family found in our solar system is as rocky as they come: a few dozen asteroids, all born from a parent blasted by an impact less than 6 million years ago.

Sixty - six million years ago, a 15 - kilometer asteroid smashed into what is now the Yucatán Peninsula by the Gulf of Mexico.

Both tsunamis had waves between 50 and 120 meters tall, and flooded up to 1 million square kilometers — roughly the same area affected by the tsunami caused by the dinosaur - killing asteroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago.

Around 4 billion years ago, Earth was an inhospitable place, devoid of oxygen, bursting with volcanic eruptions, and bombarded by asteroids, with no signs of life in even the simplest forms.

Spurred by human activity, the crisis is occurring faster and could extinguish more species than the gigantic asteroid strike that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The dinosaurs» fate may have been sealed by a piece of shrapnel from a cosmic collision that occurred long before the asteroid smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago.

If Mars formed in the asteroid belt, it could have moved inward fairly quickly, by 4 billion years ago or so — before water became a significant landscape - shaping force.

What's more, all three major groups — Palaeognathae, Galloanseres, and Neoaves — had already arisen by the time the dino - killing asteroid smacked our planet 66 million years ago, the researchers report online today in Science Advances.

Piecing those clues together, the two Alvarezes proposed a radical idea: The mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by the impact of a giant asteroid, which unleashed a globe - spanning cloud of debris and plunged the planet into darkness for months.

And because the first dust clouds would have formed with the star nearly 100 million years ago, Chen and Jura argue that «this disk must be continually replenished by asteroid collisions.»

The fossil record makes clear that birds were the only dinosaurs to survive a mass extinction about 66 million years ago, probably caused by a massive asteroid hitting Earth.

New research, led by the University of Southampton, has questioned the role played by ocean acidification, produced by the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, in the extinction of ammonites and other planktonic calcifiers 66 million years ago.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the main belt of our solar system, which move cleanly along their orbits, active asteroids were discovered several years ago mimicking comets with their tails formed by calm, long lasting ice sublimation.

During and shortly after the formation of Mercury, it was heavily bombarded by comets and asteroids for a period that ended 3.8 billion years ago.

Therefore, most of the gold that is present today in the Earth's crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.

That led many scientists to suggest that water would have been introduced on Earth at a later time, when it was pummeled by comets and asteroids during the Late Heavy Bombardment period, 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago.

According to the study, that would ensure that Earth would be re-seeded with life, following big, cataclysmic events like the Late Heavy Bombardment which happened approximately 4 billion years ago when the space environment around the Earth was dominated by untold numbers of big asteroids in the aftermath of its formation.

New findings provide evidence that Earth's most severe mass extinction an event 250 million years ago that wiped out 90 percent of the life on Earth was triggered by a collision with a comet or asteroid.

For reasons related to the orbital dynamics of the solar system, that bucolic era was brutally interrupted about 3.96 billion years ago by the «late heavy bombardment,» a period of intense asteroid impacts that churned the planet's surface.

New high - resolution observations of Vesta by the DAWN mission reveal that the creatr is part of an even larger impact basin that was created by two massive overlapping impacts roughly around one and two billion years ago, which scooped out around one percent of the asteroid's estimated volume and blasted it into space (more from NASA's DAWN Mission and NEO Program; 1997 NASA / Hubble news release; Cornell University; Thomas et al, 1997; Kelley et al, 2003; and Jerry Coffrey, Universe Today, June 15 2009; and Russell et al, 2012; Jaumann et al, 2012; Marchi et al, 2012; and Schenk et al, 2012).

The small nation of Wakanda is a protected valley enclave in east Africa, hidden from outside eyes by some very advanced technology fueled by the alien metal vibranium, which arrived via asteroid millennia ago.

The conceit of the film is that it takes place in an alternative world in which the extinction - event asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago instead passed us by harmlessly.