17:59 2002-06-29
THE TUNGUSKA METEORITE MYSTERY IS STILL UNVEILED
A very powerful blast took place 94 years ago 70 kilometers
far from the settlement of Vanavara in Russia’s Siberian republic of Evenkiya.
The power of the explosion was equal to two thousand explosions of Hiroshima
A-bomb.
A huge meteorite flew over the vast territory of West Siberia on
June 30, 1908 at 7:15 a.m. The people, who could see the meteorite in cloudless
sky, were horrified with its bright light and rattling sounds. People said that
they could see a big ball of fire flying eastwards and falling in the woods.
When scientists evinced their interest in the meteorite, they calculated the
damage of the Earth – 2000 square kilometers. The blast of the year 1908 changed
the magnetic field of the Earth: the magnetic storm, which was registered on the
outskirts of the Russian city of Irkutsk, lasted for 3.5 hours.
Strange
consequences of the collision continued 15-20 hours after the catastrophe:
unusual luminescence of the atmosphere and noctilucent clouds were registered on
the territory, which totaled 12 million square kilometers. The radiance of the
sky was so bright, that people could not fall asleep – the light was so bright
that you could easily read a newspaper at night.
Thousands of square
kilometers of woods were burnt. Scientists have had a lot of talks, trying to
find out the reason of the phenomenon in Siberia. The major version was about
the collision of the Earth with a comet or an asteroid, but none of countless
expeditions found either a crater, or some fragments of a space object. This
gave birth to a lot of unusual hypotheses: someone said that it was connected
with aliens, others said that the Earth collided with a black hole. For the time
being there are more than a hundred of hypotheses, explaining the reason of the
super-blast: they vary from the explosion of marsh gas (methane) to a spaceship
catastrophe.
The epicenter of the explosion is still preserved:
thousands of trees, lying on the ground with their roots to the center. There is
the Tunguska state reserve on that site currently, which gathers scientists (and
even tourists) from all over the world. Other hypotheses supposed that the
Tunguska meteorite was made of the anti-substance. The blast that could be seen
and heard, when the meteorite fell down, was the result of the collision of the
substance of the Earth and the anti-substance of the meteorite. But the
radioactivity is normal in the area of the fall, there are no radioactive
elements in the rocks, so a nuclear explosion could not take place there. It was
also supposed that the Tunguska meteorite was a micro-black hole, which entered
the Earth in the area of the fall, ran through the planet and went out in the
Atlantic ocean. This hypothesis also has its contradictions, like the issue of
micro-black holes existence, luminescence of atmosphere, etc. Italian scientists
said that they found the right answer: they said that an asteroid of low density
blew up in the atmosphere of the Earth.
The Tunguska meteorite was
apparently similar to Matilda asteroid, which was photographed by NEAR-Shoemaker
spacecraft in 1997. Matilda’s density was close to water. Such an object could
explode and fall to little pieces in the atmosphere, but the air-blast could
reach the Earth, which explained the absence of fragments.
Elena
Kiseleva
PRAVDA.Ru
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/06/29/31473.html