Astronomical detective
Humanity is increasingly realizing that it is not isolated from space, that the surrounding space is as much a part of our world as the atmosphere or the ocean. To know what is happening there and how is absolutely necessary not only for the further development of civilization, but perhaps for the preservation of life itself on our vulnerable planet …
End of the world?
At eight o'clock in the morning, the luminary suddenly turned bloody, and pitch darkness fell. Ash fell from the sky. There was an eerie whistle and roar like a cannon.
People plugged their ears in pain, fell to their knees, praying to God, as in the hour of death. Huge balls, sparkling like lightning, appeared in the sky. They fell with a crash, and then the ground underfoot shook three times with tremors like an earthquake. The ashfall intensified and continued throughout the first half of the day. By this time, neither grass nor foliage from under the ashes could be seen …
Wednesday 13 August 1930 This day was destined to be remembered for a long time by the inhabitants of the Indian village, lost in the jungle of the extreme north-west of Brazil, where its borders meet with the territories of Peru and Colombia.
Even 240 km from this and other Indian villages on the Curusa and Javari rivers, in the towns of Esperanza and Atalaia do Norte, explosions were heard. True, the locals thought that it was at the test site of not far away Tabalinga that the gunners started testing new guns.
Despite the local noise and panic, the rest of the world would probably never have known about the incident in the Amazonian tropics if it were not for the Capuchin monk Fedele d'Alviano. The forty-five-year-old missionary arrived in these places five days later to, as usual, communicate with his Indian flock, receive the confession of sinners, and baptize newborn babies. But the inhabitants of the shores of Kurusa could not talk to him about anything other than the terrible event of the past week. “No, the end of the world has not come,” the holy father assured them. He was an educated man and explained to the Indians that meteorites always fly in the sky - small cosmic bodies that sometimes can collide with the Earth, and before that they burn in the air, scattering fire and ash in all directions.
Promotional video:
Naturally, mortally frightened people were so easy to calm down. For a whole month, moving from village to village, Fedele's father patiently listened to the stories of hundreds of eyewitnesses and tried to dispel their fears. And when he returned to his Catholic mission in the town of São Paulo de Olivensa, he described in detail everything he had learned to the correspondent of the Vatican Telegraph Agency Fidesz (“Faith”). The official organ of the papal state in Rome, the Osservatore Romane newspaper, which is still published today, published its report on March 1, 1931.
However, except for cardinals and members of the Roman curia, no one read it, and even those remained indifferent. This event did not stir up the world. As if the prohibition adopted in the 18th century by the French Academy of Sciences remained in force: "Stones cannot fall from the sky, since there are no stones in the sky."
Lost for 65 years
Meanwhile, humanity has long had the experience of meeting with inanimate "aliens". And not only the pitiful fragments of a stone with a fist the size of which rare eyewitnesses once tried to tell French academicians. The Tunguska meteorite alone, which fell on June 30, 1908, is worth it! The similarity of the events that took place in the Siberian taiga and on the Kurus River was so great that the latter was dubbed the Brazilian Tunguska. Baptized and - almost completely forgotten.
Only in 1995 did the British Observatory quarterly publish an article by the director of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, Dr. Mark Bailey and co-authors. They honestly admitted that they learned about the Brazilian Tunguska recently - from a short note in the little-known "Journal of the International Meteorite Organization", published in Belgium.
The note belonged to the pen … of our compatriots - astronomers N. Vasiliev and G. Andreev! They simply drew the attention of colleagues in all countries to what happened many decades ago in the wilds of the Amazon. And they also offered to check whether the event was postponed in the folklore of the Indians, as it happened among the Siberian Evenks.
They referred to our popular science journal Nature and People, which is not known abroad. On its pages geologist-mineralogist L. A. Kulik - the first researcher of the Tunguska phenomenon - in 1931, that is, following fresh traces, published an article "The Brazilian Twin of Tunguska".
L. A. Kulik himself, like all the "ordinary" Soviet people of his time, had never been "abroad", where did he get information about the sensational events that took place on the shores of the distant Kurusa?
The call of N. Vasiliev and G. Andreev to conduct an "investigation" was heard by Western colleagues, and the conscientious Briton M. Bailey with some embarrassment discovered that the source of information for the "taiga bear" Kulik was … the newspaper "Daily Herald", published by the Englishman himself under sideways, in London. In the issue of March 6, 1931, on the front page was published material under the loud title "Meteorite Threat Like a Giant Space Bomb." One of the subheadings read: "Humanity is still lucky."
The author of the Daily Herald mainly recounted the facts from the Vatican's Wasser Romano, but added a few important details that were missing. For example, he mentioned that the fall caused a forest fire that raged without interruption for several months and led to the fact that the jungle was depopulated for hundreds of kilometers.
As they say, the consequences of the "crime" are obvious, but there is no "material evidence".
The investigation has begun
M. Bailey noted that the time of the incident in the wilds of the Amazon - mid-August - almost completely coincides with the annual maximum of the so-called Perseids - a meteor shower that falls over our planet at the end of summer. This is a stream of small and very tiny celestial bodies that appear from the direction of the constellation Perseus, but do not depend on it in any way. It is associated with a large comet, named after its discoverers: Swift and Tuttle. She is known to astronomers for the fact that, like a royal person, it entails a whole "retinue" of meteorite bodies. Plunging into our atmosphere, they burn up - many have observed "shooting stars".
Knowing the exact time of the event, M. Bailey easily calculated that fireballs over the jungle appeared in the northern part of the sky.
Using modern scientific methods, M. Bailey also calculated the force of the Brazilian concussion: it was equivalent to an explosion of no more than 1 megaton of trinitrotoluene. That is, about 10-15 times less than in the Tunguska phenomenon.
Note that the science of meteorites has made great strides forward over the past decade. Until recently, it was disputed that the death of dinosaurs, and with them most of the rest of the fauna and flora of the Earth, is a consequence of the fall of a large celestial body that occurred 65 million years ago. Now it seems that this is generally accepted. It was also possible to find a "wound" on our planet, inflicted, apparently, by this collision: the Chikskulubsky crater, lying at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. This fall caused an explosion with a force of about 100 million megatons of TNT. It is estimated that, God forbid, if this happened today, about 5 billion people would have gone to the next world!
The speed with which a meteoroid pierces the planet's air shell is close to 7 km / s. The impact throws millions of tons of dust into the air and converts most of the atmospheric nitrogen and moisture into acid, which then precipitates and "eats" the greenery. Those forests that the blast wave will not tumble down burn from heavenly fire; peat bogs follow them. Soot, soot, dust obscures sunlight over all continents. The earth is plunging into long-term night and winter …
True, according to calculations made until recently, even a small celestial body, only a hundred meters in diameter, falls to the Earth no more often than once every several centuries, or even millennia. And a terrifying catastrophe can happen no more often than once every 10 thousand years. In the end, earthquakes, floods, typhoons, droughts, per year, destroy much more lives than the rarest falls of meteorites. But there is also an impressive difference. All these "ground" events are limited in their consequences. But in space catastrophes we do not know borders …
What did the archives say?
N. Vasiliev and G. Andreev "woke up" not only the professional - the British M. Bailey, but also a very active amateur, the Roman astronomer Roberto Gorelli. Gorelli stuck in the archives of the Vatican for a long time - the good is at hand. But he did not find any new documents relating to the Patera Fedele d'Alviano. I had to go to the headquarters of the Capuchin Order, who were in charge of Christian missions in the Amazon.
Here he found the most detailed biography of St. Father Fedele, who was born in 1885, died in 1956 and was buried in Rio de Janeiro. His diocese in 1929-1939 included the basins of four rivers, the smallest of which was the Kurusa. Meanwhile, note that this is a considerable river - its length is 400 km! - and its existence became known only at the beginning of our century.
From the obituary, the researcher learned about another tragedy, which was averted by the missionary in the early 1930s. Then the leader convinced the Indians: the recent appearance of a deity in heaven means that soon the flame will devour the whole world. Gullible Indians on the day of Father Fedel's arrival were already preparing to take "timpo" - a neurotoxic substance from which there is no escape. With great difficulty, the missionary managed to persuade his flock that the end of the world had not yet come and that it was not worth saying goodbye to life. True, several people managed to do this before his arrival.
Here's what's strange: there is no connection between the mysterious appearance of a "deity" and a cosmic catastrophe in the text; she is not even mentioned there as such. Here, either the compiler of the obituary doubted the reality of the meteor, or the “deity” was the first plane flying low over the jungle. However, the second seems less plausible.
To check what our missionary was, R. Gorelli met with several of his colleagues who knew him during his lifetime. They described him as quite trustworthy. By the way, he told them more than once what he had heard from eyewitnesses of the Kurus events. Yes, and published the same more than once. Where? Yes, in the same Brazil!
Suspicious meadow
Here new characters enter the stage. Astrophysicist Ramiru da Reza of the National Observatory of Rio de Janeiro is a specialist in the evolution of stars. After reading a note by the Englishman M. Bailey in the Observatory, he caught fire and joined in the search. Involved in the case Enrique Lins de Barroso, director of the capital's Museum of Astronomy, and Paulo Martins Serra, one of the leaders of the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research.
This latter brought out into the white light a set of photographs of the earth's surface taken from the Landsat satellite in the area of the alleged fall of the mysterious body.
And, oh joy! Paulo Martine Serra found something suitable in the photo exactly where M. Bailey had outlined - about 5 ° S. and 71.5 ° W. Here, to the south-southeast of the village of Argemiro, standing on the bank of Kurusa, among the dense thickets, an unusual rounded "clearing" with a diameter of a kilometer and a half is visible. A little away from its center - a large shadow, perhaps - this is what experts call "scars" that remain on the surface of the earth when a celestial body falls.
To the north and south of this clearing, suspicious "tracks" were noticed, but they are much less distinct. Their very arrangement in an elongated chain in the meridian direction is quite eloquent. If the event is really connected with the Perseid meteor shower that spilled over our planet at 8 am on August 13, then the trajectory of the fallen "aliens" should have extended in a straight line from north to south.
Not all experts have succumbed to the temptation to see this as the ultimate proof. The same de Reza and Gorely are inclined to think that nothing ever reached the earth's surface. Is that the dust that covered plants and water in the river. But the explosion and destruction of the celestial body probably occurred at a relatively low altitude - between 5 and 10 km above the ground. Otherwise, dust particles would not settle so quickly and with a lower density would cover large spaces. And if the meteor exploded even lower, then the rumbling sound could not be heard by those whom it struck even 250 km from the place of impact.
Heavenly earthquake
The verification should be versatile, - decided yes Reza and requested data from the seismic observatory at the College of San Calixto in the Bolivian capital La Paz. Before sending them, the local seismologist Angel Bega looked through the records himself and saw that on that very day there was evidence of rather strong tremors, which were still considered underground. A wave from them came from the area of the Zhavari River and its tributary Kurusa.
There were three jolts - two stronger, and the last barely perceptible. Calculations showed that the wave took only 2.7 minutes. (too short time for an earthquake) to get to La Paz. This means that the event was not seismic, but apparently cosmic.
Da Reza says: “The distance from the suspicious clearing near Kurusa to the capital of Bolivia is 1,322 km. The devices recorded the first shock at the local seismic station at 07:00 04:39 local time. After 24 seconds, the second arrived - stronger and longer than the first, and the third, apparently, was partially masked by the seismic noise caused by the second."
The 24 second interval is very important here. It is too long to be responsible for the disintegration in the atmosphere into parts of just one original body. Consequently, several bodies burst into the air shell of the Earth. Bolivian seismologists came to the conclusion that the "celestial earthquake" at its epicenter reached a considerable magnitude - 7 points on the Richter scale.
Will there be direct specialists in "crime"?
But here's the annoyance: again, the ends do not quite make ends meet. Based on seismic data, the shock occurred shortly after 6:00 local time. And in the message of Fedele published by the "Osservator Romano", the time is called close to 8 in the morning. If Fedele's father was accurate, then the seismic event happened … two hours before the fall of the space alien! So, perhaps, seismologists are talking about one phenomenon, while local residents and astronomers are talking about something completely different?
Need a witness! But after all, the local Indians have a short life expectancy, after 65 years it is unlikely to meet someone from the eyewitnesses of the event. However, a rumor reached R. Gorelli that the vicar of Tabatinga, they say, is familiar with one Indian chief - he is now about eighty - who saw everything.
They came to the vicar, but he denied knowing such a person. Then da Reza went to the site, prepared questions that exclude the possibility of fiction and embellishment, and turned to an old fisherman from the nearby village of Atalaya do Norte. But the relatives of the “witness” warned that no one here believes him: all these are “fishing tales”; it turns out that this expression is also known in the Brazilian wilderness …
Fishing or not, but many of the facts obtained by researchers in general, can still be considered established. There is no doubt that on that day in the Amazon the life of a celestial object ended. And it is obvious that he flew from north to south, and fell 20 km southeast of the village of Argemiro. And that the most likely source of this object was the cluster of bodies forming the Perseid meteor shower.
Inspired by all this, yes Reza is going on an expedition to the shores of Kurusa. It would be best if at the scene of the incident there were not indirect, but direct traces of the "crime" - a crater knocked out by a fall, and in it fragments of a heavenly stone, at worst, - dust of clearly cosmic origin.
Alas, neither the Kurus nor the Tungus phenomenon presented us with such a gift. This strangeness did not cause any explanations … In the 30s, for example, a fantastic story about aliens flying towards us on a nuclear-powered spacecraft was very popular. But somewhere over Transbaikalia they suffered an accident, and the aliens, along with their "transport", were completely annihilated. And the witness, of course, jammed the camera. But now we know that in this case there must be radiation - higher than the Chernobyl one. And she's not there …
More often than others, they put forward a cometary hypothesis. A comet is a "dirty snow", a loose body of ice with snow and with individual stone inclusions. It would easily melt and leave no crater or visible debris on the earth's surface. But such an assumption refutes itself. The comet would not have enough strength to knock down forests in the entire district, start fires, cause earthquakes like earthquakes.
This became completely clear only three years ago, when the Americans Christopher Chiba from Princeton University and Kevin Zanle from NASA built a computer model that takes into account the number of trunks felled, the degree of charring and burnt wood in the taiga at various distances from the Tunguska epicenter. They came to the conclusion: the "culprit" was not a comet, but a solid rocky body - an asteroid. Its diameter is about 40-50 m, at most one hundred meters, and the speed with which it plunged into the atmosphere is about 15 km / s.
The conclusion is convincing, but the mystery remained unsolved, because the cosmic "cobblestone", it would seem, should leave at least some "material evidence" of its existence …
They are looking for something that is not. New hypothesis
And so, when this story was already on paper and the author was preparing to end it with either an ellipsis or a question mark, the mail brought in a fresh issue of the reputable scientific journal Nature published in London. And on its pages - an article by our compatriot Vladimir Svetlov, an employee of the Institute of Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the topic - where did the debris of Tunguska go?
For the first time, the author of the article in Nature was able to accurately determine the thermal energy generated by an explosion in the atmosphere. It became clear that the air around the falling "boulder" instantly warmed up to 15,000 ° C, and this is enough for melting on the surface of its individual debris, the formation of liquid drops, which the wind tore off and carried away in all directions. The asteroid "lost weight", as they say, before our eyes until there is practically nothing left of it.
Paradoxically, small space bodies - ordinary meteorites - find it easier to bring at least some of their part to the planet's surface: the aerodynamic load acts on them weaker. And that powerful blow that shook the Tunguska and, most likely, the Kurus body, immediately shattered them into many "pebbles" of about 10 cm in size at the maximum. The author of the hypothesis made calculations and came to the conclusion: the thermal radiation inside the fireball over the taiga and around it was so strong that melting, evaporation, dispersion of droplets and particles led to the complete disappearance of the Siberian "alien". Perhaps the same fate befell his Amazonian younger brother.
In a word, everyone, starting with the worthy L. A. Kulik in Siberia and, possibly, his newest followers in the Amazon, were simply looking for and are looking for something that does not exist and, most likely, cannot be. After all, the power of the Tunguska explosion is comparable to a 15-megaton nuclear charge, and this is not too different from the most powerful atomic bombs ever tested by man. What is left of the steel tower on which the USSR detonated a charge equivalent to tens of megatons of TNT in the 60s? Nothing, she just melted …
Boris Silkin