in South Africa is the largest of its kind on Earth, estimated to stretch as far as 300 kilometers from rim to rimThe scars left by ancollision some two billion years ago have long since been all but scoured away by the elements, leaving room for speculation over its true scale and the forces that created it. Now new research based on what's thought to be a more accurate simulation of the impact event suggests that the object that made the crater was larger than previously believed.
This latest analysis suggests the object responsible for the crater was closer to 20 to 25 kilometer across, traveling at a velocity of 15 to 20 kilometers per second in the moments before impact.says astrophysicist Natalie Allen"Having access to the information provided by a structure like the Vredefort crater is a great opportunity to test our model and our understanding of the geologic evidence so we can better understand impacts on Earth and beyond.
The number crunching was done by the widely used Simplified Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian simulation model, resulting in a scenario supportingthat pushes the estimated size of the Vredefort crater to a higher range – way beyond the size that a 15 kilometer-wide asteroid would create. Of course two billion years is a lot of time for a landscape to wear away, so estimating the original size of the crater with accuracy isn't straightforward. Its location is now covered in farmland, with the crater's central dome the only structure still visible today.
If the new modeling is correct, the asteroid that hit two billion years ago would have been bigger than the one that created the
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