Cosmic Dust: Accomplice in Dinosaur Death?
(From the July/August 1998 issue of StarDate magazine)
The asteroid may not have acted alone. New research into the amount of cosmic dust Earth collects as it travels through space suggests that the climate-chilling effect of increased dust in Earth's atmosphere could have led to a gradual mass extinction that left Earth without dinosaurs and many other species about 65 million years ago. Scientists think a "rubble-pile" collision of asteroids in the asteroid belt could account for increased dust levels in the inner solar system and dangerous Earth-crossing asteroid fragments. As dust levels rose over millions of years, killing off species, an asteroid or comet may have struck Earth to finish the job.
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