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Most dinosaurs (except birds!) are believed to have gone extinct about 66 million years ago when a giant meteoroid impac

Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:54 am
by answerhappygod
Most Dinosaurs Except Birds Are Believed To Have Gone Extinct About 66 Million Years Ago When A Giant Meteoroid Impac 1
Most Dinosaurs Except Birds Are Believed To Have Gone Extinct About 66 Million Years Ago When A Giant Meteoroid Impac 1 (96.08 KiB) Viewed 40 times
Compute the ratio between the total KE of the meteoroid when ithits the Earth to the energy released in the Nagasaki nuclear bombexplosion, which was about 85*10^12​​ J = 85 TJ. Does it make sensewhy this meteor impact would have devastated life globally?
I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I am pretty sure I am doingthis problem correctly but I'm clearly doing somethingwrong
Most dinosaurs (except birds!) are believed to have gone extinct about 66 million years ago when a giant meteoroid impacted the Earth in the Yucatan peninsula (the resulting crater is called the Chicxulub crater, and was first recognized in the 1970s and 1980s). This problem aims to calculate the energy of that impact based on gravitational potential energy. Here's some relevant information: • Earth-crossing meteoroids have an average speed of about 9.05 km/s relative to the Earth. This is before their motion is influenced by the Earth's gravitational pull. • A typical rock-bearing meteoroid has a density of about 4.44 g/cm'. • The dinosaur-killing meteoroid had a radius R = 12.9 km, and was approximately shaped as a sphere. • The potential energy for gravitational force is – GMem, where G = 6.67 x 10-11 m² kg-15-2 is the universal gravitational constant, ME = 6.0 x 1024 kg is the Earth's mass, m is the mass of the asteroid, and r is the distance between the meteoroid and the center of the Earth (e.g., an object sitting on the Earth's surface has r = RE, the radius of the Earth). Note that the minus sign for the potential means that gravitational potential is less than zero, but of course what matters is the difference in PE.