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On June 30, 1908, in the forests of the Tunguska River in Siberia, at 8 am and 17 minutes local time, there was a violent explosion. A huge forest of about 2,200 square kilometers was completely destroyed; at its center everything was destroyed, and around it all the trees fell radially, pointing towards the center, while whole herds of reindeer were annihilated.
Fortunately, the area was uninhabited. The first witnesses, 60 kilometers from the incident, reported extraordinary brightness and a sudden increase in temperature that burned some huts and even the hair and clothes of several people. The detonation was heard over 900 kilometers, with such force that crystal breaks were reported 650 kilometers from the site. The seismometers of the city of Ikustsk, 2,000 km to the south, recorded an earthquake in a remote region called Tunguska.
The phenomenon has also been felt on a global scale: two waves of atmospheric pressure have surrounded the planet. the atmosphere flashed strangely for two months. In Moscow, one could read the newspaper on moonless nights
But the Tunguska event went unnoticed by scientists for 20 years, because of the enormous difficulties of access to such a remote region and of political turmoil of Russia at the time. In 1927, the Russian geologist Leonid Kulik led the first scientific expedition to the site and noted the destruction of the forest, the absence of crater and no trace of fragments of meteorites. Magnetic tests, excavations and surveys in lakes and wetlands have failed to detect a single gram of meteoric metal. So, what happened to Tunguska?
Was it a meteor?
Very original explanations mention the collision of matter particles with antimatter, a wandering black hole and even the accident of an alien spacecraft. Now, we know that the explosion of Tunguska was an event necessarily produced by an object coming from space. If the impact had occurred only eight hours earlier, the Russian city of St. Petersburg would have disappeared.
Aerial research began in 1935 and found that, judging by the disposition of the rest of the forest, the disaster was produced by an explosion about 7 km in height. Early estimates ensured that the event had the force equivalent to 180 times the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. According to witnesses interviewed, the responsible object entered at an angle between 10 and 30 degrees above the horizon, and the fireball's tail fire was 800 km long.
If the impact had occurred eight hours the city of St. Petersburg would have disappeared.
There are several hypotheses that point to the person responsible for the event as a meteor, an asteroid fragment or a comet fragment. Simulations carried out show that a toy car, 5 to 100 meters in diameter, entering the atmosphere is subjected to intense air pressure in front and another almost nonexistent at the back. As a result of the difference in forces and temperatures, the object falls suddenly and violently.
In turn, the fragments are subjected to the same pressure difference and continue to be destroyed. All this occurs in tenths of a second, so that a solid object becomes a cloud of waste and, literally, an explosion in the air. And what produces the damage, it's the shockwave
The mystery concerning the identity of the intruder always remains to know if it contains ice, rock, iron or other materials; its degree of porosity, or what was its speed and its true angle of entry. Metallic meteorites are strong and dense and can fall almost intact. Then, the ideal object in Tunguska, for a NASA study group, would be a stormy meteor of 50 meters whose explosion has thrown enough dust into the upper layers of the sky. atmosphere to block sunlight for several days
. idea of the comet and do not like the idea of the asteroid. Recent simulations indicate that the object that ravaged Tunguska was smaller than expected, which has serious implications, as such collisions would then be much more likely. The new theory indicates that the explosion generated a wave that was transported at a speed greater than that of the sound and that took the form of a high-temperature gas jet that violently violated relaxed, cutting down trees and killing animals. This interpretation indicates that at the time of the collision, the forest was not healthy, so previous estimates exaggerated some aspects of the devastation.
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