What killed the dinosaurs? Dark matter, says theoretical physicist Lisa Randall

The perils of science reporting:

"That was a 18-metre-wide chunk of space rock weighing 10,000 metric tons. By way of comparison, the meteor that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago was more than 14 kilometres long.

That may not sound like a big difference in size, but you're forgetting about Einstein's famous equation for translating mass into energy."

Einstein's famous equation (e = m * c^2) isn't relevant. The equation for kinetic energy is relevant: e = 0.5 * m * v^2.

The issue is mass. 18 meters is roughly 1/1000 the size of the Chixclub asteroid. Therefore, since mass is related to the cube of the average radius, the dinosaur killer was roughly 1,000,000,000 times more massive - and the same factor applies to the released energy.