Tuesday 3 September 2024

Huge asteroid impact may have knocked over Jupiter's largest moon

 

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Joel Kontinen

When did Ganymede get its present shape?

According  to Darwinists, a massive collision billions of years ago may have dramatically reoriented Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.

But they have not known which meteor hit Ganymede, so its just a series of Darwinian  tales.

Naoyuki gata at Kobe University, Japan, and his colleagues studied Ganymede’s extensive furrow system, a series of concentric troughs believed to be remnants of the largest impact structure in the outer solarsystem.”

The centre of the furrow system aligns closely with Ganymede’s tidal axis – the imaginary line running  tales to Jupiter from the centre of the moon’s side that always faces its planet. This led the researchers to suggest that the impact that formed the furrows caused a significant redistribution of mass that reoriented the moon.

Through simulations, the researchers determined that the impactor responsible probably had a diameter of about 150 kilometres ­– significantly larger than the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth, which is estimated to have had a diameter of about 10 kilometres.

Andrew Dombard at the University of Illinois Chicago says that if an asteroid like that hit Earth, “it would be a global sterilising event, a bad day”.

Upon impact, this asteroid would have breached Ganymede’s icy crust into the liquid oceans below, creating a transient crater and hurling vast amounts of material across the moon’s surface.

Source:

Jacklin Kwan2024. Huge asteroid impact may have knocked over Jupiter's largest moon | New Scientist 3 September.