Chicxulub impactor Chicxulub impactor The Chicxulub impactor ( ), also known as the K/Pg impactor and (more speculatively) as the Chicxulub asteroid, was an asteroid or other celestial body some in diameter which struck the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago, creating the Chicxulub crater. It impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico, after which the impactor and its crater are named. Because the estimated date of the object's impact and the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) coincide, there is a scientific consensus that its impact was the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
Chicxulub crater being around in diameter. In 2011, new data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer revised the date of the collision which created the Baptistina family to about 80 million years ago. This makes an asteroid from this family highly improbable to be the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater, as typically the process of resonance and collision of an asteroid takes many tens of millions of years. In 2010, another hypothesis was offered which implicated the newly discovered asteroid P/2010 A2, a member of the Flora family of asteroids, as a possible remnant cohort of the K/Pg impactor. The Chicxulub