At HORRIFIC 280 metres, Asteroid Vredefort, which formed Earth's largest crater, was HUGE

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Researchers developed a more accurate simulation of the impact that formed Earth's largest crater Vredefort crater nearly two billion years ago. They found the impactor (most likely an asteroid) that formed the Vredefort crater is much larger than previously believed.

But according to new research from the University of Rochester, the impactor may have been much bigger and would have had devastating consequences across the planet. This research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, provides a more accurate understanding of the large impact and will allow researchers to better simulate impact events on Earth and other planets, both in the past and the future.

"Understanding the largest impact structure that we have on Earth is critical," says Natalie Allen '20, now a PhD student at John Hopkins University. Allen is the first author of the paper, based on research she conducted as an undergraduate at Rochester with Miki Nakajima, an assistant professor of Earth and environmental sciences. "Having access to the information provided by a structure like the Vredefort crater is a great opportunity to test our model and our understanding of the geologic evidence so we can better understand impacts on Earth and beyond."

Over the course of two billion years, the Vredefort crater has eroded. This makes it difficult for scientists to directly estimate the size of the crater at the time of the original impact, and therefore the size and velocity of the impactor that formed the crater.

An object that is 15 kilometers in size and traveling at a velocity of 15 kilometers per second would produce a crater about 172 kilometers in diameter. However, this is much smaller than current estimates for the Vredefort crater.