Asteroid fusion?

Factual Questions
1

Is it possible that the point of impact from an asteroid can cause fusion or fission to occur?

If thats possible, could fission and fusion act together to rain radioactive material to help wipe out the dinosaurs?

2

It seems pretty unlikely for a couple of reason.

  1. I am not aware of any known impact site displaying radation patterns consistent with this idea.
  2. Significant amounts of fission aren’t likely unless the impact happened to hit a pretty rich vein of fissionable material and even then, fission is usually triggered by stray neutrons. I don’t know what the mechanism for generating them would be.
  3. As to fusion, while tremendous amounts of energy are released during an impact, it is done in a pretty large volume of space. My gut feeling is that local (atomic scale) energy densities would fall far short of what is required. Also, the easiest fusion to achieve (temperature wise) is hydrogen to helium. The vast bulk of hydrogen in nature has no nuetrons. This would prevent or at least vastly limit the amound fusion that might take place even if the required energy density was achieved.

Also, even a moderate impact (compared to what is possible), say that 1.2 mile rock they have been discussing for they year 2019 would release roughly 20,000 times more energy than the largest nuclear device ever tested. A really big impact is gonna be even worse. Really, you would need to add a huge amount of radioactivity to make the outcome noticably worse.

The damage done by a rock a couple miles across (or larger) is so horrendous that no other mechanism is really needed to understand how it could cause devestation that would require large amounts of time to recover from.

3

What if the rock itself was radioactive?

4

If it did, it would still be unlikely to generate any nuclear scale reactions, but it could/would spread the material around in the same manner as the “dirty bombs” that have been in the news lately.

I don’t know if it reasonable for any of rocks out there to have high enough concentrations of radioactives to really make the situation measurably worse though.

5

The answer to the OP is no.

There is a misconception that radioactivity necessarily leads to fusion/fission. This is not the case. Radioactivity is a separate process from nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.

There is not enough concentrated energy to allow for anything more than a trivial amount of fusion, and fission requires extremely particular materials and conditions in order for it occur, which just do not happen in an asteroid impact.

6

Also last I heard lots of astriods have a large iron content. Iron takes more energy to fuse then it releases. Also I think it takes more energy to ‘fis’ too - so no big bang.