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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.""
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.
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.