The catastrophic space rock measured between 12.4 and 15.5 kilometres in width.
The largest asteroid ever to strike Earth, which collided with the globe approximately 2 billion years ago,
The Vredefort crater is approximately 75 miles (120 kilometres) southwest of Johannesburg.
This makes it the largest visible crater on the planet. It is, however, smaller than the Chicxulub crater, which is buried beneath Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
According to the most recent estimations, the Vredefort crater was once 155 to 174 miles in diameter.
The findings were published online on August 8 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Scientists had previously struggled to determine the original size of the Vredefort crater due to erosion over the past 2 billion years.
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