This happened in the early morning of June 30, 1908. In the very center of the Siberian taiga, a huge explosion lit up the sky. A roar was heard, the ground shook, and the shock wave flew several tens of kilometers, destroying everything in its path.
Researchers first visited this place only 19 years later, on April 13, 1927. The circumstances of this, not yet fully understood, incident, still remain a mystery.
All data show that the cause of this catastrophe was a space object: an asteroid or a comet, but there is still no clear evidence of this. Unfortunately, no one rushed to the scene immediately after the incident. But witness reports have survived, although the closest of them lived at a distance of 60 km.
So what happened in the center of the Siberian taiga?
A huge explosion was recorded, which knocked down all trees within a radius of 40 km. It was felt within a radius of 650 km, its sound was heard within a radius of 1000 km, and seismographs around the planet recorded a strong impulse.
The first researchers came to the site of the Tunguska disaster in 1927. They relied on eyewitness information. However, whenever we think about specific physical facts, such information from witnesses is only a meager basis for research and does not allow starting a real investigation.
The area of the explosion was repeatedly investigated, experts even found areas of trees felled in one direction, but they could not find any evidence that a space body fell there.
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The first expeditions also did not find any impact crater. The fall of large objects, the source of which is space, always leaves a clear trace on the surface of the Earth. This was not observed here.
In addition, the collected material samples were of very poor quality. As a result, this is a mystery to this day, which scientists are trying to unravel to this day. If traces of a crater are never found on Earth, then we can assume that something could have happened in the atmosphere itself, but then there will only be more questions about what actually happened.
There are many mysteries in the Tunguska disaster today. Various theories, hypotheses, and sometimes the most daring assumptions begin to multiply actively. The decisive factor will be the search for fragments of the cosmic body.
In June 2007, Luca Gasparini and Giuseppe Longo, scientists at the University of Bologna, announced that they had discovered a crater formed by a large meteorite or comet fragment hitting the earth's surface. According to them, this place is a small lake Cheko, located 8 km north-west of the previously supposed crash site.
This lake has a strange bottom shape - in the form of an inverted cone. No less interesting is the fact that it is not marked on any map drawn up before 1929. But does this mean that the lake was formed at the site of the fall of a space object?