The Taurid Meteor Stream Is the Debris Field of a Comet That Changed Everything.

Twenty five to thirty thousand years ago a comet of extraordinary scale - with a nucleus estimated at 50 to 60 miles in diameter, possibly larger - was captured into a sub-Jovian orbit, placing it on a trajectory through the inner solar system between the sun and Jupiter. What followed was a process Randall describes as hierarchical breakup - the comet progressively fragmenting over thousands of years into ever smaller cometary nuclei, each successive breakup producing a new generation of debris that spread along the orbital path.

The end product of that long fragmentation process is the Taurid meteor stream - the same stream that Earth passes through twice annually and that researchers including Randall have connected to the Younger Dryas impact event. The Taurids are not simply a meteor shower. They are the debris field of one of the largest cometary bodies to enter the inner solar system in human prehistory - a 60 mile wide object whose progressive disintegration over tens of thousands of years seeded the orbital path with fragments ranging from dust to objects capable of causing continent-scale destruction. Randall’s argument is that understanding the origin of the Taurid stream is inseparable from understanding what struck the Earth at the Younger Dryas boundary.

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