Headline : Asteroid Bigger than the Dino-Killer Knocked the Solar System’s Largest Moon Sideways

Read more from the original article on here at time.com.

---

No. of Paragraph 9

The asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have been a major cosmic crack-up, but it was nothing compared to a bigger impact that occurred roughly four billion years earlier, between an incoming rock and Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. That’s the conclusion of a new study in Scientific Reports, suggesting that the distant world was knocked completely sideways by the long-ago bombardment.

Ganymede is one of the most complex of Jupiter’s nearly 100 moons—and indeed, one of the most intriguing worlds in the entire solar system. It is the only known moon with its own magnetic field and is believed to have a salty ocean 60 miles deep, lying beneath a 95-mile thick crust. That makes it a prime place for the potential emergence of life. At nearly 3,300 miles in diameter, Ganymede is also the solar system’s largest moon—bigger even than the 3,030-mile wide planet Mercury. But that doesn’t mean it’s impervious to a pounding.

Like our moon, Ganymede is tidally locked—meaning it keeps the same face pointed to its parent planet at all times. In the 1980s, astronomers discovered a radiating system of ripple-like furrows exceeding 1,000 miles in diameter at the center of the moon’s far side. A scar like that could only have been formed by an impact—but just how cataclysmic it was had never been clear. The scale of the collision could have implications for the internal structure and temperature of the moon, which in turn could have implications for the emergence of life. Now, planetologist Hirata Naoyuki of Kobe University in Japan believes he knows more about the force of the impact—and the size of the impactor.

Read more: 2024 Marks an Important Year in NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Read more from the original article on here at time.com.

Related Headlines : Asteroid Bigger than the Dino-Killer Knocked the Solar System’s Largest Moon Sideways (in Google.com):

Hello, below you have a "Web" tab to read more content and an "Image" tab to get related pictures

Example : Trends, Country, News, Jobs, Scholarships, Investment, Business, Politics, Adverts, Fashion, Events, Technology and more.