Impact event: Quick Facts

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Photos and Videos

Vredefort Dome impact structure

Map of the northern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico highlighting the location and circular outline of the Chicxulub crater, which is about 180 kilometers in diameter and partly extends into the Gulf of Mexico. The map also shows nearby cities such as Merida, Cancun, Campeche, and Playa del Carmen, as well as international borders with Belize and Guatemala. An inset globe marks the region's location in the Americas.

Chicxulub impact crater

Aftermath of the Tunguska event

A thick, white meteorite contrail stretches across the sky above buildings and trees in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia.

A logarithmic graph shows the average interval between Earth impacts by near-Earth objects of different diameters, plotting frequency in years against object size and kinetic energy. Markers highlight the Tunguska and Chicxulub events, with a shaded area indicating the global catastrophe threshold.

debris blasted from Dimorphos

DART spacecraft: asteroid crash

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Topics

Comet Asteroid Meteorite crater meteoroid Planetary defense Crater space motion Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction Lorentz transformations Galilean transformations Lagrange point Three-body problem Mach’s principle Node Diurnal motion