Posted on 09/05/2024 3:36:37 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...Approximately 4 billion years ago, an asteroid hit Ganymede. Now, a Kobe University researcher has discovered that the Solar system's biggest moon's axis shifted as a result of the impact...the asteroid was around 20 times larger than the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth...
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, bigger even than the planet Mercury, and is also interesting for the liquid water oceans beneath its icy surface. Like the Earth's moon, it is tidally locked, meaning that it always shows the same side to the planet it is orbiting and thus also has a far side. On large parts of its surface, the moon is covered by furrows that form concentric circles around one specific spot, which led researchers in the 1980s to conclude that they are the results of a major impact event...
...Hirata was the first to realize that the purported location of the impact is almost precisely on the meridian farthest away from Jupiter. Drawing from similarities with an impact event on Pluto that caused the... rotational axis to shift and that we learned about through the New Horizons space probe, this implied that Ganymede, too, had undergone such a reorientation...
...the asteroid probably had a diameter of around 300 kilometers, about 20 times as large as the one that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and ended the age of the dinosaurs, and created a transient crater between 1,400 and 1,600 kilometers in diameter...
According to his simulations, only an impact of this size would make it likely that the change in the distribution of mass could cause the moon's rotational axis to shift into its current position. This result holds true irrespective of where on the surface the impact occurred.
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
Kobe University Naoyuki Hirata was the first to realize that the location of an asteroid impact on Jupiter's moon Ganymede is almost precisely on the meridian farthest away from Jupiter. This implied that Ganymede had undergone a reorientation of its rotational axis and allowed Hirata to calculate what kind of impact could have caused this to happen.Credit: Naoyuki Hirata
Isn’t that where the Time Lords live?
I know, it’s Gallefrey.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was just 6 miles wide.
ALLEGED dino killer. Had it not occurred we’d have no gasoline today. Right? Hello? Anyone? Bueller....
One of the most widespread beliefs about fossil fuels โ oil, natural gas and coal โ is that these substances started out as dinosaurs. Thereโs even an oil company, Sinclair, that uses an Apatosaurus as its icon. That dino-source story is, however, a myth. What is true: These fuels got their start long, long ago โ at a time when those โterrible lizardsโ still walked the Earth. Read more at: https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fuels-come
I know right. Just how many dinosaurs would there have to have been. It ain’t called abiotic for no reason.
My reading is that the Earth is continually producing oil, natural gas, etc. Since plastics come from oil would that mean those dino-saurs would have been plastic in the beginning? Just asking for a friend.
Not alleged. It happened.
๐ ๐ฅ
This one is purported to be 20 times as wide, so, more or less 20 times in each dimension, or perhaps as much as 8000 times the mass of the Chicxulub impactor, while Ganymede is less dense than Earth and 3,275 miles diameter compared with 7,926 miles diameter of the Earth.
OTOH, the orbital velocity of Jupiter is only 43 percent that of Earth, and that would be in the ballpark of the velocity of this impactor on Ganymede. A lot of energy. The resulting density of Ganymede would be in part determined by the density of the impactor, so the ice that makes up a lot of Ganymede today will have come from the impactor.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ganymede-satellite-of-Jupiter
Incredible! This would be a true planet killer.
All those plastic dinosaurs my son had as a child we could have run our cars for a year! (And he knew ALL of their names.)
Per the late Eugene Shoemaker, the impact on Earth of a rock about a mile in diameter ("about" because they're not perfect spheres) would release more energy than the world's nuclear stockpiles stacked in one pile and set off simultaneously. Depending on where it hit, even a half-mile rock would end civilization and kill over 99% of the Earth's humans.
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