Paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on
Earth.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died?utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_brand=tny
The Day the Dinosaurs Died
A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.
By Doulas Preston
If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.
A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.
Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.
The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.
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Europa? Well, maybe there's something in its ocean, and just maybe its DNA started on Earth. Probably not dinosaurs. 
nor the software needed to identify shifting objects in the sky.
It's SCIENCE FICTION!!!
Just spoke to My Son the Astronomer, and he tells me they can see very small asteroids, as in just a few meters across. I'm amazed.
So your book is good to go!
My astronomy was limited to a single college course, and that was over forty years ago. That, and I scored a tome, a dated encyclopedia of astronomy, and digested it from cover to cover before I took the course; Kepler was a God in my eyes. P squared = R cubed was so simple and yet so profound, and to think he figured it out without the benefit of a slide rule or a pocket protector!
I don't trust people who aren't interested in science.
Fossil Site Reveals Day That Meteor Hit Earth and, Maybe, Wiped Out Dinosaurs
A jumble of entombed plants and creatures offers a vivid glimpse of the apocalypse that all but ended life 66 million years ago.
By William J. Broad and Kenneth Chang
March 29, 2019
A tangled mass of articulated fish fossils uncovered in North Dakota. The site appears to date to the day 66 million years ago when a meteor hit Earth, killing nearly all life on the planet. Robert DePalma/University of Kansas
By The New York Times | Sources: PNAS; Geological Society of America
A partially exposed, perfectly preserved 66-million-year-old fish fossil uncovered by Mr. DePalma and his colleagues. Robert DePalma/University of Kansas
