Hole in Asteroid Belt Reveals Extinction Asteroid

eldavojohn writes "Further evidence for the asteroid mass extinction theory has been discovered as a break in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. From the article, "A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon.""

Comments

How to get mainstream coverage

[paleo2002]

If you want your obscure research paper to receive mainstream media coverage and net you loads of grant money, be sure to link your work to one or more of the following "hot topics":

meteor impact

dinosaurs

mass extinction

global warming

DNA

obesity

energy efficient cars

OK, fine. There's a gap in the asteroid belt indicating that several large objects were knocked loose some time in the past few million years. And, yes, those objects will be most likely to fall towards the Sun and insect the orbits of the inner planets. That doesn't mean you've found where the infamous dinosaur-killing meteor came from. That's pure speculation! That gap could just as easily been left by the meteor that caused the P/Tr extinction or by a meteor that hit Venus.

The Problems with Tycho as an Impact Crater

[pln2bz]

There is certainly a place for theories that propose that Tycho is an impact crater, and it's a very good thing that people are actually proposing simulations in an attempt to explain what we see. The idea that catastrophe plays an important role in our surroundings has increasingly become accepted. But, what do the astrophysical heretics say about Tycho? Only by listening to what they say can we play devil's advocate with this particular simulation ...

[...]

The astronomers' consensus today is that the streamers are the trails of material ejected from the crater into narrow paths over extraordinary distances. But the "rays", Juergens noted, have no discernible depth, while material exploding from a Tycho-sized crater "would at least occasionally fall more heavily in one place than in another and build up substantial formations. But no one has ever been able to point out such a ray 'deposit'".

The presence of the narrow rays over such long distances, according to Juergens, is "all-but-impossible to reconcile with ejection origins. Enormous velocities of ejection must be postulated to explain the lengths of the rays, yet the energetic processes responsible for such velocities must be imagined to be focused very precisely to account for the ribbon-thin appearance of the rays". In fact, this challenge has found no answer in more recent scientific exploration. No experimental explosion at any scale has ever produced anything comparable to the well-defined 1500-kilometer "rays" of Tycho.

Even more telling is the fact that the rays are punctuated with numerous small craters. An early explanation was that "some solid material was shot out with the jets and produced 'on-the-way' craters". But such narrow trajectories for secondary impactors are an absurdity under the mechanics of an explosion. And the total volume of ejected material needed to form the secondary craters along Tycho's rays, would amount to some 10,000 cubic kilometers - an amount of material entirely inconsistent with careful measurements indicating that practically all material excavated from Tycho's crater has been deposited in its rim. However, the ray elements, terminating on small craters, are the very markers that today's electrical theorists have cited repeatedly as definitive evidence of an electrical discharge path. As Wallace Thornhill has so often observed, such discharge streamers frequently terminate at a crater. In fact, this is exactly what Gene Shoemaker found when investigating the puzzles of Tycho--"...many small secondary craters, too small to be resolved by telescopes on earth, occur at the near end of each ray element."

When compared to an imagined sphere of the Moon's average radius, the surrounding highland region occupied by Tycho is more than 1200 meters above the "surface" of that sphere. The crater site appears to be at the summit, or very close to the summit, of terrain that trends downward in every direction away from the site for hundreds of kilometers. For the impact theory, this location can only be an accident. But for the electrical theorists, the elevation on which Tycho sits is not accidental. Lightning is attracted to the highest point on a surface. (That is, of course, the principle behind lightning arrestors placed on the pinnacles of tall buildings).

Though astronomers see Tycho's rays as material ejected from the focal point of an impact, a mere glance at this picture is sufficient to make clear that not all of the streamers radiate from a central point. Is this surprising? A mechanical impact has a single focal point and cannot explain these offset rays. Juergens noted that they "diverge from a common point, or common focus, located on or buried beneath the western rim of the crater." The electrical interpretation of Tycho sees the streamers as paths of electrons rushing across the lunar highlands to the highest point, where it launches into space to form the lightning "l

Re:The Problems with Tycho as an Impact Crater

[pln2bz]

We've actually witnessed collisions in space. And found evidence on earth for them. We've never seen any evidence for electrical arcs between heavenly bodies that would cause craters.

This sounds a bit pseudo-skeptical to me. Are you aware that many of the images by the impactor in the Deep Impact mission clearly demonstrated numerous points of white-out? Check this out ...

http://deepimpact.umd.edu/gallery/wipeout.html

Either you believe everything that NASA interprets in its images as word of God, or there is the possibility that those white-outs are electrical arcs.

I've stated it many times before here on these forums -- because people around here tend to not realize it -- but it's worth repeating that Wallace Thornhill was able to predict nearly *all* of the results of the Deep Impact mission on the basis of space plasmas being electrical. In fact, he predicted that a pre-impact flash would be observed. And sure enough, there were two flashes at the time of impact. Nobody was predicting anything like that prior to the impact.

From day one, there have been issues with impact theory. As you may know, Meteor Crater was mined for years and the impacting body was never found within the crater. The Tunguska Crater has had the same problem.

But, the evidence is really quite significant by now that space plasmas can be electrical. In the lab, plasmas change in luminosity and resistance based upon their charge density according to three disjointed curves: the dark mode, the glow mode and the arc mode. If you ask me, the only thing preventing nature from doing the same thing are the mainstream astrophysicists themselves. Our laboratory experience should be relevant to what's happening in space.

Hannes Alfven postulated a theory that was later validated on how charge separation can occur in space (critical ionization velocity). Furthermore, it takes less than 1% of ionization within the lab for a gas to conduct electricity. Electric Universe Theory has nothing to do with exotic theoretical physics. All they're saying is that the plasma phenomenon we observe within the laboratory are relevant to our observations of space. That's it.

Only when an event cannot be explained by any existing model formed from previous observations, will they resort to wild guessing ( see string theory, multiple universe theory, etc).

If you decided to expose yourself to it -- something which few people actually do -- you would come to realize that there is a very legitimate debate to be had here. The problem is that people are satisfied with explaining away evidence which supports electrical space plasmas rather than considering the body of evidence as a whole that supports the notion. This is actually a perfect definition of pseudo-skepticism: applying skepticism in an unfair manner. This might be a legitimate procedure for interpreting observations if the mainstream theories were successfully predicting our observations. The thing is, they aren't. Don't you think that if the mainstream theories are so correct that we shouldn't be seeing so many surprises in our observations by now?

Re:The Problems with Tycho as an Impact Crater

[pln2bz]

These are all good points, but I think the key to that sentence was the fact that the rays do not change in width over the course of 1500 kilometers. That is somewhat enigmatic. We see this sort of thing in space too: vortexes that are able to retain their shape over numerous light years. Although we can certainly postulate mechanical processes that could possibly explain this, it is not giving credit to what we know of electrodynamics to ignore that these are also the hallmarks of electrical activity.

When we (really) explore space

[JoeCommodore]

I kind of expect in the future when we have ships cheap/reliable enough for regular exploration of the solar system one of our future generations does something stupid by knocking some asteroid out of whack leading to a chain reaction that causes some big space catastrophe. Then we will have space traffic laws and all that other stuff.

Sun-grazing

[Guppy]

Just curious -- although it is unlikely for an object to actually hit the sun, how likely are objects to be tidally disrupted or boiled away by near-grazes?

Re:No crap

[rucs_hack]

For a bit of fun when I was running my solar system model a while back I tried to hit Sol with an asteroid. Its rather tricky, but it can be done if the velocity is low enough and you contrive an orbit. It's virtually impossible, at least I never managed it, to slingshot an object around one of the inner planets and hit the sun.

Yes, yes, I'm a geek, I have no life, I really spent days doing this [/sob]

There's the other thing though, define 'impact'. Most comets are icy, many asteroids are ice and shale. Put those close to the sun and you get vapour, and no more comet/asteroid. That would be an impact. my software can't do such things, but I probably got a few impacts of this type.

Incidentally altering the mass of the sun up to the Chandrasekhar limit doesn't mean any of the planets collapse into the sun, they all get ejected. Neptune gets into an orbit so elliptical and fast that I believe it would be stripped to whatever is at its core before it was finally ejected.

I salute you!

[Gazzonyx]

Just watched the videos on YouTube. Thank you, sir. I was going to do stuff tonight before you had to go and get me off on this tangent for several hours. Intriguing stuff; it's a pity people won't let themselves ask "what if our theories are wrong?".

I'm not sure that I fully support this model, but it makes a lot of sense, and as usual the mainstream view is, "this isn't what I was told it right, so it's wrong. I'll arrogantly wave my hand, attack peoples character, resort to name calling, and make sure I never present a single chard of debatable evidence to bolster my position." One only needs to read a few criticisms from the video to verify what I've said.

I would love to see an academic debate on this. It seems we've got the idea that we've finally figured it all out... just the way that everyone else before us thought the same. I sometimes laugh at the very notion that we've made any progress when we can't even humble ourselves enough to accept that we might be wrong. If you're in the mainstream of anything and you're sure that you're right, you'll be a victim of your own pride in the worst way - you'll be forced to defend your position until you can't hold your ground any longer and become 'that guy who was replaced by the new guy who has the right idea'. I think we know where the 'new guy' ends his career, as well.

Ironically, I could be completely wrong. I may have missed the mark on this one, as I clearly don't know anything about cosmology, astronomy, or physics. Perhaps I'll be shown to be the fool. ;)

Re:No crap

[Stefanwulf]

WTF does an eclipse show?

Well, if you start with a known distance between yourself and the sun and then wait for an object of known size (an asteroid, the moon, etc) to pass between you and it at another known distance, recording the exact percent of the sun which is occluded by the object, you should be able to use those figures to determine the sun's size.

Thus using an eclipse to show that the sun is bigger than the earth, albeit in a way that's exceedingly round-about and unnecessary.

Re:Gap in asteroid tracking data -- Earth at risk?

[ChrisA90278]

Yes it's the collisions that will toss debris at us. But the time between the collision and the debris hitting us would be between millions of years or "only" a few centuries. What we need to care about is the debris from collisions that occurred long ago. But a collision would be very interesting to observe for other reasons but I'd gues they are very rare and one may not happen while humans live on Earth.