Scientists Find The Dinosaur-Killer

From The Globe and Mail - Technology News:

TORONTO — The asteroid that smacked into Earth and is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have originated in an enormous collision between two asteroids about 100 million years earlier, researchers argue in a paper to be published tomorrow in the influential journal Nature. Professor William Bottke, assistant director of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Col., and colleagues are more than 90 per cent sure that the breakup of a massive asteroid about 170 kilometres in diameter within the innermost region of the Main Asteroid Belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, created what is now known as the Baptistina asteroid family. They argue that a chunk of this asteroid 10 kilometres in diameter made its way through the solar system and smashed into Earth millions of years later, creating the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

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