Fine dust suspended in the atmosphere may have played a significant role in the extinction of dinosaurs after all.
The Deniliquin structure spans up to 520 kilometres in diameter. This exceeds the size of the near-300km- wide Vredefort impact structure in South Africa, which to date has been considered the world's largest.
When the asteroid struck our planet some 66 mil years ago, it created a 180-km impact crater and produced a gigantic magma chamber. A new research found that this hydrothermal system supported an entire microbial ecosystem.
Scientists have discovered Earth's oldest asteroid strike occurred at Yarrabubba, in outback Western Australia 2,2 billion years ago, and coincided with the end of a global deep freeze known as a Snowball Earth.