Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “Tungussky Meteorite”
Against the background of human life, the concept of “cosmic catastrophe” sounds somehow abstract, unreal. But just look at the photographs of the Moon, Mercury, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, their face, “disfigured” by meteorite bombardments, as it becomes clear that cosmic catastrophes in the Solar System occur much more often than we suppose. The recent fall on Jupiter of the Shoemaker-Levy comet is direct evidence of this. The Earth, thanks to its dense atmosphere, is well protected from small meteoroids weighing tens and hundreds of kilograms. But what will happen if the Earth collides with an asteroid or a comet weighing a million tons? This scenario was played by the scientific world several times. It is assumed that a similar event on Earth does not occur more than once every 20,000 years. For humanity, this is too long a time to “accumulate factual material.” That is why the Siberian catastrophe of 1908 is a unique event and invaluable material for studying possible collisions of cosmic bodies.
In the foreseeable history of mankind on the scale of the observed phenomena it is difficult to find a more grandiose and mysterious event than the fall of the “Tunguska meteorite”. So far, stories about him are controversial to any audience. Scientists of many countries of the world are struggling in vain over the solution of the mystery of the century, periodically notifying the world of another sensation about the discovery of the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite. Written hundreds of scientific papers, made films. The annual expeditions bravely go to the taiga in the hope of at least a little to “push” the problem and understand what was it all the same: a spaceship, a fragment of a cold comet or an ordinary meteorite?
SIBERIAN CATASTROPHE 1908
Unsolved mystery of the 20th century: “Tungussky Meteorite”
On Tuesday, June 30, 1908, at about seven o’clock in the morning local time, a large fireball bolide flew from the Sun to the north-east of Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska from the south-east to north-west from the Sun. People who watched his flight across a cloudless sky were horrified by the blindingly bright light and the rumbling sounds. Panic began in distant taiga settlements. More than a thousand kilometers around heard the rumble of thunder. The flight of the space alien ended in a grand explosion over deserted taiga at a height of about 7-10 kilometers. The inhabitants of the small trading station Vanavara and the few Evenk nomads who were on the hunt near the epicenter of the explosion witnessed the disaster. In a matter of seconds, a blast wave within a radius of about 40 kilometers covered the forest, beasts were destroyed, people were injured. At the same time under the action of light radiation for tens of kilometers around the taiga flared. The outbreak of fire destroyed the little that survived the explosion. A solid mound of 80 million trees occurred on an area of 2,150 km2. The space hurricane for many years turned the once rich vegetation and game taiga into a dull cemetery of a dead forest. The study of the consequences of the catastrophe showed that the explosion energy ranged from 10-40 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand nuclear bombs simultaneously blown up, dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The blast air wave that circled the globe was recorded by many meteorological observatories in the world. At the crash site, as a result of the explosion, there was a partial mutation of plants, tree growth accelerated, the chemical composition and physical properties of the soil changed. The earthquake caused by the explosion was noted in Irkutsk, Tashkent, Tbilisi and in the German city of Jena. According to AVVoznesensky, Director of the Irkutsk Meteorological Observatory, for the first time in the history of science, seismometers recorded shocks from a meteorite strike. The beginning of the earthquake occurred at 00 o’clock. 17 min 11 seconds of universal time. The arrival of the air wave at the observatory was 2.5 minutes late, which later allowed its speed to be set at 318 – 321 m / s. Until now, it remains unclear how the 1908 explosion caused a change in the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic storm, noted near Irkutsk, lasted about 3.5 hours. The strange consequences of the collision of the Earth with an unknown cosmic body were not limited to this. On the night of June 30 to July 1, that is, 15-20 hours after the disaster, from the western shores of the Atlantic to central Siberia and from Tashkent to St. Petersburg, over an area of more than 12 million km2, an unusual glow of the earth’s atmosphere and night glowing clouds (noctilucent clouds). The clouds, formed at an altitude of about 80 kilometers, intensely reflected the sun’s rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had not been observed before. The glow of the sky was so strong that many people could not sleep. In a number of cities at night one could freely read a newspaper printed in small print, and in Greenwich at midnight a photograph of the seaport was obtained. This phenomenon continued for several more nights.
