This is maybe just a tiny bit morbid but also cool science: A team of geologists and Earth scientists have figured out a new way to identify ancient impact craters : By the way they burned everything around them*. When a cosmic body like an asteroid or comet hits a planet, the vast energy of its motion is released. Think of it this way: It takes a huge amount of energy to get something moving rapidly, and the bigger/faster it is the more energy it takes. If you stop it, it takes exactly that much energy as well, and if you stop it rapidly — like say, by letting it hit a planet — all that energy is released rapidly. An asteroid the size of a mountain or even a small hill moving at a dozen or more times as quickly as a bullet has a lot of energy. A lot . It can easily dwarf a nuclear weapon, or even thousands of them for a big enough impact. The Chicxulub impact that did in the dinosaurs had the energy of one hundred million one-megaton nukes .…