Photo: Tunguska meteorite fall site (presentation)
The fall of the Tunguska meteorite
Year of the Fall
June 30, 1908 A mysterious object, later called the Tunguska meteorite, exploded and fell in the earth's atmosphere.
Crash site
The territory of Eastern Siberia between the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska rivers forever remained as crash site The Tunguska meteorite, when a fiery object flared up like the sun and flew several hundred kilometers, fell on her.
Photo: the alleged fall site of the Tunguska meteorite
The sound of thunder could be heard for almost a thousand kilometers around. The flight of the space alien ended with a grand explosion over the deserted taiga at an altitude of about 5 - 10 km, followed by a complete collapse of the taiga in the area between the Kimchu and Khushmo rivers - tributaries of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, 65 km from the village of Vanavara (Evenkia). Living witnesses space catastrophe became the inhabitants of Vanavara and those few Evenki nomads who were in the taiga. The place where the Tunguska meteorite fell can be seen at Google map maps
Size
Tunguska meteorite caused a blast wave, which felled a forest within a radius of about 40 km, killed animals, and injured people. Its size was 30 meters. Due to the powerful light flash of the Tunguska explosion and the flow of hot gases, a forest fire broke out, completing the devastation of the area. In a vast space bounded from the east by the Yenisei, from the south – by the line “Tashkent – Stavropol – Sevastopol – northern Italy – Bordeaux”, from the west – by the Atlantic coast of Europe, unprecedented in scale and completely unusual light phenomena unfolded, which went down in history under the name “light nights of the summer of 1908." The clouds formed at an altitude of about 80 km intensely reflected Sun rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had not been observed before. Throughout this gigantic territory, on the evening of June 30, night practically did not fall: the entire sky was glowing (it was possible to read a newspaper at midnight without artificial lighting). This phenomenon continued for several nights.
Weight
Based on the scattering of particles, their concentration and the estimated power of the explosion, scientists estimated as a first approximation the weight of the space alien. It turned out, The Tunguska meteorite weighed about 5 million tons.
Expeditions
In the history of mankind, in terms of the scale of observed phenomena, it is difficult to find a more grandiose and mysterious event than Tunguska meteorite. The first studies of this phenomenon began only in the 20s of the last century. Four expeditions, organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences and headed by mineralogist Leonid Kulik, were sent to the site where the object fell. However, even 100 years later, the mystery of the Tunguska phenomenon remains unsolved.
In 1988, participants of the research expedition of the Siberian Public Fund " Tunguska space phenomenon"under the leadership of corresponding member of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts (St. Petersburg) Yuri Lavbin, metal rods were discovered near Vanavara. Lavbin put forward his version of what happened - a huge comet was approaching our planet from space. Some highly developed civilization in space became aware of this .Aliens to save the Earth from global catastrophe, sent out their sentinel spaceship. He was supposed to split the comet. But, unfortunately, the attack of the most powerful cosmic body was not entirely successful for the ship. True, the comet's nucleus crumbled into several fragments. Some of them fell on Earth, and most of them passed by our planet. The earthlings were saved, but one of the fragments damaged the attacking alien ship, and it made an emergency landing on Earth. Subsequently, the ship's crew repaired their car and safely left our planet, leaving on it failed blocks, the remains of which were found by the expedition to the site of the disaster.
Photo: Fragment of the Tunguska meteorite
Behind long years searching for debris Tunguska meteorite Members of various expeditions discovered a total of 12 wide conical holes in the disaster area. No one knows to what depth they go, since no one has even tried to study them. However, recently, for the first time, researchers thought about the origin of the holes and the pattern of tree collapse in the area of the cataclysm. According to all known theories and practice itself, fallen trunks should lie in parallel rows. And here they are clearly unscientific. This means that the explosion was not classical, but something completely unknown to science. All these facts allowed geophysicists to reasonably assume that a careful study of conical holes in the ground would shed light on the Siberian mystery. Some scientists have already begun to express the idea of the earthly origin of the phenomenon.
In 2006, according to the president of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Foundation, Yuri Lavbin, in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River at the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall Krasnoyarsk researchers discovered quartz cobblestones with mysterious writings.
According to researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made manner, presumably through the influence of plasma. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones, which were studied in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Research has confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are fused layers of plates, each of which contains signs of an unknown alphabet. According to Lavbin's hypothesis, quartz cobblestones are fragments of an information container sent to our planet by an extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.
Hypotheses
It was expressed more than a hundred different hypotheses what happened in the Tunguska taiga: from the explosion of swamp gas to the crash of an alien ship. It was also assumed that iron or stone meteorite with the inclusion of nickel iron; icy comet core; unidentified flying object, starship; gigantic ball lightning; a meteorite from Mars, difficult to distinguish from terrestrial rocks. American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan stated that the Earth encountered a “black hole”; some researchers have suggested that it was fantastic laser ray or a piece of plasma torn away from the Sun; French astronomer and researcher of optical anomalies Felix de Roy suggested that on June 30 the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust.
Ice comet
The most recent is ice comet hypothesis, put forward by physicist Gennady Bybin, who has been studying the Tunguska anomaly for more than 30 years. Bybin believes that the mysterious body was not a stone meteorite, but an icy comet. He came to this conclusion based on the diaries of the first researcher of the “meteorite” fall site, Leonid Kulik. At the scene of the incident, Kulik found a substance in the form of ice covered with peat, but did not attach much importance to it, since he was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with flammable gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but proof that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that was scattered into many pieces after a collision with our planet, the Earth became a kind of hot frying pan. The ice on it quickly melted and exploded. Gennady Bybin hopes that his version will become the only true and last one.
Meteorite
However, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still meteorite, exploded above the surface of the Earth. It was his traces that, starting in 1927, were searched for in the area of the explosion by the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene of the incident. Expeditions discovered that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing, but without branches.
Subsequent expeditions noticed that the area of fallen forest had a characteristic butterfly shape, directed from east-southeast to west-northwest. The total area of fallen forest is about 2,200 square kilometers. Modeling the shape of this area and computer calculations of all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with earth's surface, and even before that in the air at an altitude of 5–10 km.
Tesla
"At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries, hypothesis about the connection between Nikola Tesla and the Tunguska meteorite. According to this hypothesis, on the day the Tunguska phenomenon was observed (June 30, 1908), Nikola Tesla conducted an experiment on transmitting energy “through the air.” A few months before the explosion, Tesla claimed that he could light the road to the North Pole expedition famous traveler Roberta Peary. In addition, there are records in the journal of the US Library of Congress that he requested maps of the “least populated parts of Siberia.” His experiments to create standing waves, where a powerful electrical pulse was said to be concentrated tens of thousands of kilometers away Indian Ocean, fit well into this “hypothesis”. If Tesla managed to pump a pulse with the energy of the so-called “ether” (a hypothetical medium, which, according to the scientific concepts of past centuries, was assigned the role of a carrier of electromagnetic interactions) and “swing” the wave with the resonance effect, then, according to the myth, a discharge with a power comparable to nuclear explosion."
Other hypotheses
Writers also gave their versions of the Tunguska phenomenon. The famous science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev described the Tunguska phenomenon as a disaster of a spaceship flying towards us from Mars. Writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in their book “Monday Begins on Saturday” put forward a humorous hypothesis about contrarians. It explains the events of 1908 in reverse time, i.e. not by the arrival of the spacecraft to Earth, but by its launch.
| date | Author. Hypothesis. | The essence of the hypothesis. Problems. |
| 1908 | Ordinary | Descent of the god Ogda. Flight of the fiery kite. Repetition of the tragedy of Sodom and Gomorrah The beginning of the 2nd Russian-Japanese War. |
| 1908 | I. K. Solonina | Enormous size aerolite |
| 1921 | L. A. KulikMeteoritic | Based on the results of a survey of eyewitnesses, it was concluded that a meteorite fell in the Podkamennaya Tunguska region. |
| 1927 | L. A. Kulik | Iron meteorite Fragments of an iron meteorite associated with Comet Pons–Winnicke fell. Problems: Why did the high-altitude explosion occur? Where are the remains of the meteorite? What caused the Western White Nights? |
| 1927 | Meteorite transformation | For the first time, people started talking about the version of the meteorite turning into jets of fragments and gas. |
| 1929 | A meteorite flying tangentially | The body fell at a small angle to the horizon, did not reach the Earth, broke up and experienced a rebound, rising a hundred kilometers upward. The fragments, having lost speed, fell in a completely different place. She explained the lack of physical evidence, white nights, etc., but the calculations did not confirm it. |
| 1930 | F. Whipple Explosion of a comet nucleus | The Earth collided with a small comet (the comet’s nucleus is a “lump” dirty snow"), which completely evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving no trace. Problems: How could a comet sneak up unnoticed? The comet could not have penetrated that deep into the atmosphere. |
| 1932 | F.de RoyV. I. VernadskySpace objects | The Earth collided with a compact cloud of cosmic dust. |
| 1934 | Kometnaya | Collision with a comet's tail. |
| 1946 | A. P. KazantsevAlien | Explosion of atomic engines of an alien ship. Problems: No traces of radiation detected. |
| 1948 | L. LapazK. CowanU. Libby Antimatter meteorite | The Tunguska meteorite is a piece of antimatter that experienced annihilation in the atmosphere, i.e. completely converted into radiation due to nuclear processes. Problems:Annihilation should have occurred in the upper atmosphere. No annihilation products (neutrons and gamma rays) were found. “The entire Universe is material” (A.D. Sakharov) |
| 1951 | V. F. Solyanik | Positively charged iron-nickel meteorite The meteorite moved with an inclination angle of 15-20 degrees, at a speed of >10 km/s. Intense mechanical interaction occurs between the Earth's surface and a flying meteorite, reaching several million tons. Approaching 15-20 km to the Earth's surface, the dark matter began to discharge, producing various mechanical damage. |
| 1959 | F. Yu. ZiegelAlien | The meteorite explosion is similar to the destruction of the planet Phaeton, once located between the planets Mars and Jupiter. A UFO exploded at the crash site. As arguments, he gave increased level radioactivity at the epicenter of the explosion and the maneuver of the Tunguska body when moving through the atmosphere at almost 90 degrees. Problems: No traces of radiation detected. |
| 1960 | G. F. Plekhanov Biological (comic) | Detonation explosion of a cloud of midges with a volume of more than 5 cubic kilometers. |
| 1961 | Alien | Disintegration of a flying saucer. |
| 1962 | Meteorite-electromagnetic | About the electrical breakdown of the ionosphere to Earth caused by a meteor. |
| 1963 | A. P. NevskyElectrostat. meteorite discharge | According to his calculations, a body with a radius of 50-70 meters moved at a speed of 20 km/sec, then discharged at an altitude of about 20 km. was almost completely destroyed. |
| 1963 | I. S. AstapovichRicochet of a comet | Due to the flat trajectory (inclination angle of about 10 degrees) and the minimum flight altitude, which was about 10 km, the small comet, having passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and causing destruction during braking, lost its shell, and the core entered interplanetary space along a hyperbolic trajectory. |
| 1964 | G. S. Altshuller V. N. ZhuravlevaAlien | The explosion was caused by a laser signal that came to Earth from the civilization of the planetary system of the 61st star from the constellation Cygnus. |
| 1965 | A. N. StrugatskyB. N. StrugatskyAlien | An alien ship with a reverse flow of time. |
| 1966 | Meteorite | The fall of a superdense piece of a white dwarf. |
| 1967 | V. A. EpifanovNatural | Due to a local earthquake or geological displacement of the earth's layers, a crack formed in the crust, into which dust, fine suspended oil and methane hydrates escaped mixed with “blue fuel” and ignited from lightning. |
| 1967 | D. Bigby Alien | Having discovered ten small moons with strange trajectories, he came to the conclusion: in 1908, a UFO arrived, a capsule with a crew separated from it and exploded over the taiga, the ship was in earth orbit until 1955, waited for the crew and lost altitude, finally, “automatic machines went off,” and there was an explosion. |
| 1968 | Natural | Dissociation of water and explosion of detonating gas. |
| 1969 | Kometnaya | The fall of a comet made of antimatter. Problems: “The entire Universe is material” (A.D. Sakharov) |
| 1969 | I. T. ZotkinMeteoritic | The radiant of the Tunguska fireball is similar to the radiant of the daytime meteor shower Beta Taurid, which in turn is associated with Comet Encke |
| 1973 | A. JacksonM. RyanBlack hole | The Tunguska meteorite was actually a miniature “black hole” of very small mass. In their opinion, it entered the Earth in Central Siberia, passed through, and emerged in the North Atlantic region. |
| 1975 | G. I. PetrovV. P. StulovKometnaya | Only a loose comet nucleus is capable of penetrating so deeply into the Earth's atmosphere. Density should be no more than 0.01 g/cm. |
| 1976 | L. KresakKometnaya | The Tunguska object was actually a fragment of Comet Encke - an old and faint comet with the shortest orbit of all the comets moving around the Sun - that broke off several thousand years ago. |
| 80s | L. A. MukharevNatural | A giant ball lightning exploded, which arose in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of powerful energy pumping by ordinary lightning, or sharp fluctuations in the atmospheric electric field. |
| 80s | B. R. GermanNatural | Lightning generated by cosmic dust invading the earth's atmosphere at cosmic speed. By its nature, Tunguska ball lightning was a cluster type of lightning. |
| 80s | V. N. SalnikovNatural | The explosion is associated with the emergence of a powerful electromagnetic “vortex” (underground thunderstorm) from the depths of the earth. A natural analogue of this phenomenon is ball lightning. |
| 80s | A. N. Dmitriev V. K. Zhuravlev | The Tunguska meteorite is a plasmacide that broke away from the Sun. |
| 1981 | N. S. KudryavtsevaNatural | The release of a gas-mud mass from a volcanic pipe located near Vanavara. |
| 1984 | E. K. Iordanishvili Meteorite | A celestial body flying at a low angle to the surface of our planet became heated at an altitude of 120-130 km, and its long tail was observed by hundreds of people from Lake Baikal to Van Avara. Having touched the Earth, the meteorite “ricocheted” and jumped several hundred kilometers upward, and this made it possible to observe it from the middle reaches of the Angara. Then the Tunguska meteorite, having described a parabola and lost its cosmic speed, actually fell to Earth, now forever. |
| 1984 | D. V. Timofeev Natural | Explosion of 0.25-2.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas. A plume of gas, escaping from the bowels of the Earth in the area of the Southern Swamp on June 30, 1908, formed an explosive mixture. He was set on fire by lightning or a fireball. |
| 1986 | M.N. Tsynbal | A meteorite consisting of metallic hydrogen. A block of metallic hydrogen weighing 400,000 tons, instantly dispersed, combined with oxygen to create an explosive mixture of large volume. |
| 1988 | A. P. KazantsevAlien | The Tunguska meteorite is a landing module that separated from the Black Prince starship, a mysterious satellite discovered in Earth orbit by Californian astronomer John Bagby in 1967. |
| Beginning 90s | M. V. TolkachevKometnaya | The Tunguska comet could consist of gas hydrate compounds instantly released under the influence of a sharp change in temperature. |
| Beginning 90s | V. G. Polyakov Meteorite | The meteorite consisted of sodium of cosmic origin. Penetrating into the dense layers of the atmosphere containing water vapor, the meteorite entered into contact with it chemical reaction. A chemical explosion occurred in the critical saturation region. |
| Beginning 90s | A. E. ZlobinKometnaya | The iron core of a long-period comet that flew to us from the Oort cloud had superconductor properties due to its low temperature. This largely determined the conditions for its penetration into the Earth’s atmosphere and the unusual nature of the explosion. |
| 1991 | Natural | An unusual earthquake accompanied by some light phenomena. |
| 1993 | K. Chaiba P. Thomas K. TsanleKometnaya | A body of cometary nature should collapse at an altitude of 22 km. A small rocky asteroid, approximately 30 meters in diameter, would collapse at an altitude of about 8 km. |
| 1993 | Meteorite | The fall of an ice meteorite, which, having discharged the electrical charge accumulated on its surface, flew off into space again. |
| 90s | A.Yu. Olkhovatov Natural | The Tunguska phenomenon was a type of earth earthquake that arose at the site of a geological fault in the area of the Kulikovo paleovolcano. |
| 90s | A. F. Ioffe E. M. DrobyshevskyKometnaya | A chemical explosion of an explosive mixture of oxygen and hydrogen released from cometary ice by electrolysis after its repeated passage around the Sun. |
| 90s | V. P. EvplukhinMeteoritic | The meteorite was an iron ball with a radius of 5 meters and a mass of 4,100 tons, surrounded by a silicate shell. Due to braking in dense layers of the atmosphere, a current was induced in it, then a sharp heating and sputtering of the substance occurred. The subsequent airglow was caused by the ejection large quantity ionized iron. |
| 1995 | Meteorite | About antimatter entering the Earth's atmosphere. |
| 1995 | Meteorite | About a special meteorite with a carbonaceous chondride. |
| 1995 | A. F. Chernyaev | Ethereal-gravity bolide The meteorite did not fall to the Earth, but rather flew out of its depths, turning out to be an ether-gravitational bolide. The “ether-gravity bolide” is a super-dense stone block, like an underground meteorite, supersaturated with compressed ether. |
| 1996 | V. V. Svetsov Meteorite | A rocky asteroid with a diameter of 60 meters and a weight of 15 megatons entered the atmosphere at an angle of 45 degrees and penetrated deep into the atmosphere. Not having slowed down enough, and in dense layers it experienced enormous aerodynamic loads, which completely destroyed it, turning it into a swarm of small (no more than 1 cm in diameter) fragments immersed in a high-intensity radiation field. |
| 1996 | M. Dimde Energy | An experiment on transmitting the energy of electric waves over a distance. A few months before the explosion, Tesla claimed that he could light the way to the north pole for the expedition of the famous traveler R. Pirri. When trying to do this, he made a mistake in his calculations. |
| 1996 | Alien | About the entry of extraterrestrial matter into the Earth’s atmosphere, possibly a planet with a high content of iridium. |
| 1997 | B. N. IgnatovNatural | The Tunguska explosion was caused by "the collision and detonation of 3 ball lightning with a diameter of more than one meter each." |
| 1998 | B. U. Rodionov | An explosion of hypothetical linear matter contained within each thread of a magnetic flux quantum. |
| 1998 | Yu. A. Nikolaev Meteorite | Release 200 kt. natural methane, and then an explosion of methane-air cloud initiated by a stone or iron meteorite three-meter diameter. |
| 2000 | V. I. Zyukov Comet | The Tunguska meteorite could be a relict ice comet, which was a block of ice of a high modification. The proposed modification of ice makes it possible to solve the issue of the strength of the TCT when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and is in good agreement with many known observational facts. |
| July 2003 | Yu. D. Labvin Martian-comet-alien | Labvin Yu. D. believes that in order to prevent a large-scale catastrophe, due to the collision of an invading comet (of Martian origin) with the Earth, it was destroyed by an alien ship that launched from Earth and died when the comet was destroyed. In 2004, on the shores of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, a scientist discovered materials belonging to a technical device of extraterrestrial origin. According to preliminary analyses, the metal is an alloy of iron and silicon (iron silicide) with the addition of other elements, unknown in this composition on Earth and having a very high temperature melting. |
But these are all just hypotheses, and the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite remains a mystery.
Thousands of researchers are trying to understand what happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga. In addition to Russian expeditions, international expeditions are regularly sent to the Tunguska disaster area.
Consequences
Tunguska meteorite for many years turned the rich taiga into a cemetery of dead forest. Studying consequences of the disaster showed that the explosion energy was 10 - 40 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand simultaneously detonated nuclear bombs, similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Later, increased tree growth was discovered at the center of the explosion, indicating a radiation release. And this is not all the consequences of the Tunguska meteorite...
One of the most mysterious natural phenomena of the last century was and remains the story of the meteorite fall of 1908 in the river basin Podkamennaya Tunguska. At the moment, there is no consensus regarding this phenomenon; since 1946, there have been debates regarding the nature of the object that exploded above the earth's surface, and it is even noted that, according to the collected data, it was not a meteorite at all, but this particular one still appears in various literature term.
Some hypotheses connect the fall of an unknown object with global changes in world history and attribute symbolic meaning to the phenomenon and magical properties or call it a product of alien intelligence. However, no theory regarding Tunguska phenomenon was not unanimously confirmed or rejected; to this day, various studies of the largest cosmic catastrophe are being conducted 20th century.
Historical data and facts
Unusual a natural phenomenon occurred in Eastern Siberia in the basin Podkamennaya Tunguska river early in the morning at the end of June 1908. For several moments, a burning unidentified object in the shape of a ball could be observed flying and then exploding at an altitude of just under ten kilometers from the surface of the earth. Even the exact time has been set– 7:14 am. The explosion occurred in dense taiga forests. As a result of the research, the supposed epicenter of the explosion was established.
Outwardly, it resembled an explosion comparable to the explosion of the most powerful atomic bomb, up to fifty megatons of TNT equivalent. The explosion caused a huge shock wave, which, according to British seismologists, circled the replacement ball twice. The shock wave toppled trees within a radius of several hundred kilometers, and windows in houses were broken. Seismologists different parts shaking was recorded across the continent earth's crust. A few days before and after the events of that day in the atmosphere above Europe very unusual phenomena were observed: a glow reminiscent of the northern lights during twilight, a change in the color of the clouds to silver, and in the daytime one could see crowns and halos around the sun.
Research of the Tunguska meteorite fall site
At the beginning of the last century, means of communication and communication between cities, especially those located so far from the capital, were not as developed as they are now. They did not immediately learn about the disaster, and did not attach much importance to it due to the lack of information about the scale of the event. The main witnesses to the incident were the Evenks who inhabited the village closest to the epicenter of the explosion. locality, Vanavara village. And the first expedition led by a scientist L. Kulik and to the place where the Tunguska cosmic body fell ( TKT) was sent only 13 years after the disaster.
Kulik's expedition was not properly equipped with special equipment, equipment and instruments; the scientists were armed only with instruments such as a magnetometer and a number of other measuring devices. However, despite this, Kulik During several subsequent expeditions, he managed to obtain many facts regarding the epicenter of the explosion; it was he who first put forward the claim that an iron meteorite fell in the taiga.
Scientists from all over the world to this day come to Siberia in the hope of obtaining facts that are related to the disaster and unraveling the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite.
Basic theories and hypotheses of the nature of the phenomenon
Over the years of research into the crash site TKT Many theories about the origin of this body have been put forward and rejected. The version of the meteorite fall has not received proper confirmation and has raised doubts among many scientists. Most theories can be divided into several main groups:
- meteorite;
— cometary;
- natural;
— energy;
— alien;
- religious.
Meteorite theory was questioned due to the fact that the stone samples found at the bottom of the drained Yuzhnoye swamp were not of alien origin and appeared at the site of the supposed epicenter of the explosion before or after the 1908 event. No other traces of the fall of the TKT were also found: meteorite dust or other microparticles.
A theory was put forward about the crash of an alien spaceship, accompanied by an explosion of a nuclear engine, which was first voiced in A. Kazantsev’s article “Explosion” in 1946. According to Kazantseva Based on the power of the explosion, the strength of the shock wave and the nature of the destruction, which was comparable to the scale of the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima in 1945, the only explanation for the phenomenon could be a nuclear explosion.
The 360 TV channel was looking into why not a single fragment of the Tunguska meteorite, which provoked a powerful explosion, has yet been found.
Next news
Exactly 109 years ago, a powerful explosion occurred in Siberia caused by the fall of the Tunguska meteorite. Despite the fact that more than a century has passed since that moment, there are still many blank spots in this story. “360” tells what is known about the fallen cosmic body.
In the early morning of June 30, 1908, when the inhabitants of the northern part of Eurasia were still dreaming, a terrible natural disaster almost broke out over them. Many generations of people did not remember anything like this. Something similar could be seen almost 40 years later at the end of the terrible war in history.
That morning, a monstrous explosion thundered over the remote Siberian taiga in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Scientists subsequently estimated its power at 40-50 megatons. Only Khrushchev’s famous “Tsar Bomba” or “Kuzka’s Mother” could release such energy. The bombs that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much weaker. People who lived in those days major cities northern Europe, it was lucky that this event did not happen over them. The consequences of the explosion in this case would be much worse.
Explosion over the taiga
The site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, which occurred on June 30, 1908 in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River (now the Evenki National District of the Krasnoyarsk Territory of the RSFSR). Photo: RIA Novosti.
The fall of an unknown space alien to Earth did not go unnoticed. A few eyewitnesses, taiga hunters and cattle breeders, as well as residents of small settlements scattered in Siberia, saw the flight of a huge fireball over the taiga. Later, an explosion was heard, the echo of which was caught far from the scene of events. At a distance of hundreds of kilometers from it, windows were broken in houses, and the blast wave was recorded by observatories in various countries in both hemispheres. For several more days, flickering clouds and an unusual glow in the sky were observed in the sky from the Atlantic to Siberia. After the incident, people began to remember that two or three days before they had noticed strange atmospheric phenomena- glows, halo, bright twilight. But whether it was fantasy or truth cannot be established for sure.
First expedition
Soviet scientist A. Zolotov (left) takes soil samples at the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall. Photo: RIA Novosti.
Humanity learned about what happened at the site of the disaster much later - only 19 years later the first expedition was sent to the area where the mysterious celestial body fell. The initiator of the study of the site of the fall of the meteorite, which was not yet called Tunguska, was the scientist Leonid Alekseevich Kulik. He was an expert in mineralogy and celestial bodies and led a newly created expedition to search for them. He came across a description of the mysterious phenomenon in a pre-revolutionary issue of the newspaper “Sibirskaya Zhizn”. The text clearly indicated the location of the event, and even cited eyewitness accounts. People even mentioned the “top of the meteorite sticking out of the ground.”
The hut of the first expedition of researchers led by Leonid Kulik in the area of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite. Photo: Vitaly Bezrukikh / RIA Novosti.
In the early 1920s, Kulik's expedition managed to collect only scattered memories of those who remembered a flaming ball in the night sky. This made it possible to approximately establish the area where the space guest fell, where the researchers went in 1927.
Consequences of the explosion
The site of the Tunguska meteorite explosion. Photo: RIA Novosti.
The first expedition found that the consequences of the cataclysm were enormous. Even according to preliminary estimates, forests over an area of more than two thousand square kilometers were felled in the area of the fall. The trees lay with their roots towards the center of the giant circle, pointing the way to the epicenter. When we managed to get to him, the first riddles appeared. In the supposed area of the fall, the forest remained standing. The trees stood dead and almost completely devoid of bark. There were no traces of a crater anywhere.
Attempts to solve the mystery. Funny hypotheses
A place in the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, where 80 years ago (June 30, 1908) a fiery body called the Tunguska meteorite fell. Here, on the taiga lake, is the laboratory of the expedition to study this disaster. Photo: RIA Novosti.
Kulik devoted his entire life to the search for the Tunguska meteorite. From 1927 to 1938, several expeditions were carried out to the epicenter area. But the celestial body was never found, not a single fragment of it was found. There weren't even any dents from the impact. Several large depressions gave hope, but a detailed study revealed that these were thermokarst pits. Even aerial photography did not help in the search.
The next expedition was planned for 1941, but it was not destined to take place - the war began, which pushed all other issues in the life of the country into the background. At the very beginning, Leonid Alekseevich Kulik went to the front as a volunteer as part of a people's militia division. The scientist died of typhus in the occupied territory in the city of Spas-Demensk.
Forest fall in the area where the Tunguska meteorite fell. Photo: RIA Novosti.
They returned to studying the problem and searching for the crater or the meteorite itself only in 1958. A scientific expedition organized by the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences went to the taiga to Podkamennaya Tunguska. She also did not find a single fragment of a celestial body. For many years, the Tunguska meteorite has attracted many different scientists, researchers and even writers. Thus, science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev suggested that an interplanetary spaceship exploded over the Siberian taiga that night, unable to make a soft landing. Other hypotheses have been put forward, some serious and some not so serious. The funniest of them was the assumption that existed among the researchers of the crash site, tormented by midges and mosquitoes: they believed that a huge ball of winged bloodsuckers exploded over the forest, which was hit by a lightning bolt.
So what was it
Diamond-graphite intergrowths from the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite on the Podkamennaya Tunguska River near the village of Vanavara in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Photo: RIA Novosti.
To date, the main version is the cometary origin of the Tunguska meteorite. This also explains the lack of finds of fragments of a celestial body, because comets consist of gas and dust. Research, searches and construction of new hypotheses continue. A mysterious meteorite, mentioned many times in books, comics, films, TV shows and even in music, may still be waiting for someone to find its fragments. The mystery of the origin and “death” of the celestial body also awaits a final solution. Humanity thanks chance for the fact that the Tunguska meteorite (or comet?) fell in the remote taiga. If this had happened in the center of Europe, most likely the whole modern history Earth. And in honor of Leonid Alekseevich Kulik - a romantic and discoverer - they were named minor planet and a crater on the Moon.
Alexander Zhirnov
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On the thirtieth of June 1908, a monstrous thunder thundered over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, which is located on the territory of the modern Krasnoyarsk Territory. Its consequences were recorded by seismic stations around the world. One of the few witnesses to the explosion describes it this way:“I saw a flying hot ball with a fiery tail. After its flight, a blue stripe remained in the sky. When this fireball fell to the west of Mog, then soon, about 10 minutes later, I heard three shots, as if from a cannon. The shots came one after another, within one or two seconds. From where the meteorite fell, smoke came out, which did not last long” - from the collection “Eyewitness Reports of the Tunguska Meteorite of 1908”, V.G. Konenkin.
As a result of the explosion, trees were knocked down over an area of 2,000 square kilometers. For comparison, the area of modern St. Petersburg is approximately 1,500 square kilometers.
Was it a meteorite?
The name “Tunguska meteorite” itself should be considered very conditional. The fact is that there is still no clear opinion about what exactly happened in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. This happened largely because the first research expedition led by L.A. Kulika was sent to the explosion area only 19 years later, in 1927. At the supposed site of the fall, among thousands of fallen trees, no fragments of a cosmic body, no crater, or a significant amount of chemical traces of the fall of a celestial body were found big size.In 2007, Italian scientists suggested that the place where the supposed object fell was Lake Cheko, at the bottom of which lies the debris. However, this version also found its opponents.
Research continues to this day, and even today scientists cannot accurately determine whether a meteorite, comet, or asteroid fragment fell to earth or whether it was a non-cosmic phenomenon. The lack of explanation on this issue continues to trouble people's minds. Professionals and amateurs who are not indifferent to the problem presented more than a hundred versions of what happened. Among them there are both scientifically based hypotheses and fantastic theories, up to the crash of an alien ship or the results of Nikola Tesla’s experiments. If this is ever solved, then it is possible that the very name “Tunguska meteorite” will become irrelevant.
Tunguska meteorite as imagined by an artist
There are a lot of space legends in the Russian-speaking space. Almost every village has a hill above which mysterious lights were seen in the sky, or a hollow left by a “comet”. But the most famous (and actually existing!) remains the Tunguska meteorite. Having descended from heaven on the unremarkable morning of June 30, 1908, he instantly laid down 2000 km²taiga, broke out the windows of houses hundreds of kilometers around.
Explosion near Tunguska
However, the space guest behaved very strangely. It exploded in the air, several times, did not leave a trace, and the forest fell to the ground without a blow. This ignited the imagination of both science fiction writers and scientists - since then, at least once a year, it appears a new version what caused the explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Today we will explain what the Tunguska meteorite is from the point of view of astronomy, photos from the fall sites will become our guides.
The most important, the very first and most unreliable information about a meteorite is the description of the meteorite fall. The whole planet felt it - the wind reached Britain, and the earthquake swept across Eurasia. But only a few personally saw the largest fall of a cosmic body. And only those who survived could tell about it.
The most reliable witnesses say that a huge fiery tail flew from north to east, at an angle of 50° to the horizon. After that Northern part The sky was lit up by a flash that brought great heat: people tore off their clothes, and dry plants and fabrics began to smolder. This was the explosion - more precisely, thermal radiation from it. The shock wave with wind and seismic vibrations came later, knocking trees and people to the ground, breaking windows even at a distance of 200 kilometers!
Strong thunder, the sound of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, came last, and resembled the roar of cannon fire. Immediately after this, a second explosion occurred, less powerful; most of the eyewitnesses, stunned by the heat and shock wave, only noticed its light, which was described as “the second Sun.”
This is where the reliable testimony ends. It is worth taking into account the early hour of the meteorite fall and the identities of the eyewitnesses - these were Siberian peasant settlers and aborigines, Tungus and Evenki. The latter in their pantheon of gods have iron birds that spit fire, which gave the stories of eyewitnesses a religious connotation, and ufologists - “reliable evidence” of the presence of a spaceship at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.
Journalists also tried: the newspapers wrote that the meteorite fell right near railway, and the train passengers saw a space rock, the top of which protruded from the ground. Subsequently, it was they, in close connection with science fiction writers, who created a myth with many faces, in which the Tunguska meteorite was both a product of energy, and interplanetary transport, and Nikola Tesla’s experiment.
Tunguska myths
Chelyabinsk meteorite, the younger brother of the Tunguska meteorite chemical composition and fate, was filmed by hundreds of cameras during its fall, and scientists quickly found solid remains of the body - but there were still people who promoted the version of its supernatural origin. And the first expedition to the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall was undertaken 13 years after the fall. During this time, new undergrowth managed to grow, streams dried up or turned their course, and eyewitnesses left their home on the waves of the recent revolution.
One way or another, Leonid Kulik, a well-known mineralogist and meteorite expert in the Soviet Union, led the first search for the Tunguska meteorite in 1921. Before his death in 1942, he organized 4 (according to other sources - 6) expeditions, promising the country's leadership meteorite iron. However, he found neither a crater nor the remains of a meteorite.
So, where did the meteorite go, and where to look for it? Below we will look at the main features of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite and the myths generated by them.
“The Tunguska meteorite exploded stronger than the most powerful nuclear bomb”
The force of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, according to the latest calculations of supercomputers at the US Sandia National Laboratory, was “only” 3–5 megatons of TNT. It's more powerful though nuclear bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, but much less than the monstrous 30 - 50 megatons that appear in the data about the Tunguska meteorite. Previous generations of scientists were let down by an incorrect understanding of the mechanism of a meteorite explosion. The energy did not spread evenly in all directions, as during the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but was directed to the earth in the direction of movement of the cosmic body.
“The Tunguska meteorite disappeared without a trace”
The crater from the Tunguska meteorite was never found, which gave rise to a lot of speculation on this topic. However, should there be a crater at all? Above, it was not for nothing that we called Tungussky’s younger brother - it also exploded in the air, and its main part, weighing several hundred kilograms, was found at the bottom of the lake only thanks to multiple video recordings. This was due to its loose, friable composition - it was either a “pile of rubble”, an asteroid composed of pili and individual parts, or part of it. Having lost most of the mass and energy in an air flash, the Tunguska meteorite could not have left a large crater, and in the 13 years separating the date of the fall and the first expedition, this crater itself could turn into a lake.
In 2007, scientists from the University of Bologna managed to find the crater of the Tunguska meteorite - theoretically, it is Lake Cheko, which lies 7-8 kilometers from the site of the explosion. It has a regular ellipsoidal shape, directed towards the forest felled by the meteorite, a conical shape, characteristic of impact craters, its age is equal to the age of the meteorite fall, and magnetic research indicate the presence of a dense object at the bottom. The lake is still being studied, and perhaps soon the Tunguska meteorite itself, the culprit of all the commotion, will appear in the exhibition halls.
Leonid Kulik, by the way, was looking for such lakes, but near the crash site. However, science was then unaware of the descriptions of meteorite explosions in the air - the remains of the Chelyabinsk meteorite flew quite far from the explosion site. Having drained one of the “promising” lakes, the scientist found at its bottom... a tree stump. This incident gave rise to a comic description of the Tunguska meteorite as “an oblong cylindrical object in the form of a log, made from a special type of cosmic wood.” Later, there were fans of sensations who took this story seriously.
“The Tunguska meteorite created Tesla”
Many pseudoscientific theories about the Tunguska meteorite originated from jokes or incorrectly interpreted statements. This is how Nikola Tesla became involved in the meteorite story. In 1908, he promised to light the way in Antarctica for Robert Peary, one of the two people credited with leading the way to the Arctic Pole.
It is logical to assume that Tesla, as the founder of the modern AC electrical network, had in mind some more practical method, rather than creating an explosion at a considerable distance from Robert Peary’s path in Siberia, maps of which he allegedly requested. At the same time, Tesla himself argued that transmission over long distances can only be done using ether waves. However, the absence of ether as a medium of interaction electromagnetic waves was proven after the death of the great inventor.
This is not the only fiction about the Tunguska meteorite that is being passed off as truth today. There are people who believe in the version of “an alien ship moving back in time” - only it was first introduced in the humorous novel by the Strugatsky brothers “Monday Begins on Saturday”. And the participants of Kulik’s expeditions, bitten by the taiga midge, wrote about billions of mosquitoes that had gathered into one big ball, and their heat generated a burst of energy with a power of megatons. Thank God, this theory did not fall into the hands of the yellow press.
“The site of the Tunguska meteorite explosion is an anomalous place”
At first they thought so because they did not find either a crater or a meteorite - however, this is explained by the fact that it exploded completely in, and its fragments had much less energy, and therefore were lost in the vast taiga. But there are always “inconsistencies” that allow you to idly fantasize about the Tunguska meteorite. We will analyze them now.
- The most important “proof” of the supernatural nature of the Tunguska meteorite is that in the summer of 1908, supposedly before the fall of the cosmic body, glows and white nights appeared across Europe and Asia. Yes, one could say that any low-density meteorite or comet has a dust plume that enters the atmosphere before the body itself. However, a study of scientific reports on atmospheric anomalies in the summer of 1908 showed that all these phenomena appeared in early July - that is, after the meteorite fell. This is the consequence of blindly trusting headlines.
- They also note that in the center of the meteorite explosion, trees without branches and foliage remained standing, like pillars. This, however, is typical for any powerful atmospheric explosions - surviving houses and pagodas remained in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at the very epicenter of the explosion. The movement of the meteorite and its destruction in the atmosphere knocked down trees in the shape of a butterfly, which also caused bewilderment at first. However, the already notorious Chelyabinsk meteorite left the same mark; There are butterfly craters even on. These mysteries were solved only in the second half of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons appeared in the world.
This house was located 260 meters from the epicenter of the explosion in Hiroshima. There weren't even any walls left from the houses.
- The last phenomenon is an increase in the growth of trees in the place of a forest felled by an explosion, which is more characteristic of electromagnetic and radiation bursts than of thermal bursts. The strong explosion of the meteorite definitely took place in several dimensions at once, and the fact that trees began to grow quickly in fertile soil exposed to the sun is not at all surprising. Thermal radiation itself and injury to trees also affects growth - just as scars grow on the skin at the site of wounds. Meteorite additives could also accelerate the development of plants: many iron and silicate balls and fragments from an explosion were found in the wood.
Thus, in the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, only the power of nature and the uniqueness of the phenomenon are surprising, but not the supernatural overtones. Science is developing and penetrating into people's lives - and using satellite television, satellite navigation and looking at images of deep space, they no longer believe in the firmament and do not mistake astronauts in white spacesuits for angels. And in the future, much more amazing things await us than the fall of meteorites - the same plains of Mars untouched by man.
