When you have these sun grazers, its not so much the melting that goes on, which is a pretty small fraction relative to the total mass, but the comet is so close to the sun that the part thats closer to the sun feels a stronger gravitational pull than the part that is farther from the sun, causing a tidal force he said. El crter de Chicxulub (AFI: [tikulub] ()) es un antiguo crter de impacto cuyo centro aproximado est ubicado al noroeste de la pennsula de Yucatn, en Mxico. The Vredefort Crater, located about 120 kilometers southwest of Johannesburg, is currently about 159 km in diameter, making it the largest visible crater on Earth. DOI: 10.1073/pnas . Google hasn't just paid tribute to the Chicxulub crater with its search engine, but the company has also dedicated a section on Google Earth to the historic site. It must have been an amazing sight, but we dont want to see that side, he said. prevented to reach the surface of the Earth, cooling it down abruptly. "There are arguments on both sides," says JPL's Dr. Don Yeomans, who manages NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office. google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
A map showing the location of the Chicxulub crater. Dont take our word for it, try it yourself just follow this link. As per The New Yorker, it wasnt until the late 1970s that geologist Walter Alvarez and his physicist father, Luis Alvarez, discovered that the crater was a result of an asteroid impact. One of them, (BEV-4), was deep enough to reach the ejecta deposits. Later, through contact with Alan R. Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. It is hard to imagine that one of the largest impact craters on Earth, 180-kilometers (112-mile) wide and 900-meters (3,000-feet) deep, could all but disappear from sight, but it did. Evidence for the crater's impact origin includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas. Computer generated gravity map of Chicxulub Crater (c) Source: nasa.gov,