The largest asteroid ever to hit Earth and crashed into the planet about 2 billion years ago, possibly
Vredefort Crater, located approx.120km southwest of Johannesburg. Its current diameter is 159 km, making it the largest visible crater on Earth. However, it is smaller than the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Its diameter is about 180 km and was left by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago.
The problem is that impact cratersover time they slowly collapse, which causes them to shrink. According to recent estimates, the original diameter of the Vredefort crater was between 250 and 280 km when it formed 2 billion years ago. As a result, it should be considered the largest impact crater on Earth, despite the fact that today it is smaller than Chicxulub.
Image courtesy Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat
In the past, scientists thought that the craterVredefort was originally much smaller—about 172 km wide. Based on this assessment, the researchers calculated that the size of the asteroid responsible for the impact would have been about 15 km across and it would have hit the planet at a speed of about 53 900 km/h. But in a new study, scientists have revised the size of the crater and gained new insight into the size of the huge space rock.
The researchers recalculated the size of the asteroidVredefort and found that the space rock was between 20 and 25 km across and was traveling at 72,000 to 90,000 km/h when it crashed into the planet.
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