The world community celebrates Asteroid Day on June 30. It was on this day 108 years ago that a powerful explosion occurred on the territory of Siberia, known as the "Tunguska phenomenon" or "Tunguska meteorite". More than a hundred years later, scientists have not been able to unravel the mystery of this mysterious phenomenon.
The explosion occurred over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. It was heard within a radius of 100 kilometers. It was accompanied by a pillar of flame and a giant cloud of smoke. According to eyewitnesses, before the explosion, a dazzlingly bright body swept over the Tungus taiga, eclipsing the sunlight.
The explosion was recorded by seismographs of the Irkutsk Observatory at seven in the morning on June 30, 1908. At first, experts thought it was an earthquake, since the Irkutsk Observatory is located near mountain ranges, and such phenomena are repeated here quite often. However, this time the recording of the seismograph looked very strange. The characteristic zigzags were repeated longer than usual, and there were some incomprehensible additional zigzags.
Observatory staff immediately sent messages to local correspondents to inquire about the earthquake. The answers were completely unexpected. Most of the correspondents claimed that there was no earthquake at all, but there were very loud sounds, reminiscent of thunder or gunfire.
Eyewitness reports
One of the correspondents wrote that at about eight o'clock in the morning, he heard thunder, which became stronger and stronger and resembled a powder explosion, which then grew into a crack, and then into a rumble. After 20 minutes, the thunder stopped. The author also reported that one of his neighbors saw a flying star with a fiery tail as if it fell into the water.
An employee of the meteorological station in Kirnsk, seeing an extra line on the barograph tape, decided to question local residents. “They said that at the beginning of the eighth in the northwest a pillar of fire appeared in the form of a spear. When the pillar disappeared, five strong blows were heard, as from a cannon, then a thick cloud appeared in this place. After 15 minutes, the same blows were heard again, after another 15 minutes the same was repeated,”he wrote in his memoirs.
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Later it turned out that the shaking of the soil was recorded by seismic stations in various parts of the world, including in the Western Hemisphere. For several days, a strong glow of the sky was observed in the territory from the Atlantic to central Siberia.
Kulik's expeditions
The first expedition to the crash site was sent almost 20 years after the incident. It was headed by Leonid Alekseevich Kulik, who showed a special interest in the study of a strange celestial body called the "Tunguska meteorite". The researchers found that in the place of the alleged fall of the meteorite, a forest fell over a large area. The strangest thing was that in the place that was supposed to be the epicenter of the explosion, the forest remained standing, and there were no traces of a meteorite crater.
The subsequent several expeditions of Kulik, which took place from 1927 to 1939, also did not find any evidence of a meteorite falling, although the facts of the disaster were very clearly visible. Kulik tried to find the remains of the meteorite, organized aerial photography of the crash site, collected information from local residents, but did not find anything related to the meteorite.
Calculations showed that the fall of the Tunguska meteorite would lead to the formation of a crater 200 meters deep and 1000 meters in radius. Such a pit is easy to find even now. In addition, there should be more extensive destruction at the epicenter of the explosion, but the trees resisted there. Moreover, their branches were broken off in such a way, as if a blast wave hit them from above.
At first, Kulik took a hilly peat bog for the remains of a crater and began excavations there. However, neither excavation nor crater drilling yielded results. The meteorite disappeared without a trace. And the swamp itself turned out to be a karst sinkhole. Kulik's research was interrupted in 1941 due to the war, but until recently he remained a supporter of the hypothesis about the meteoric nature of the Tunguska phenomenon.
Ice comet, alien ship and other versions
However, the research did not end there. After the war, other expeditions began to the area of the fall of the "Tunguska meteorite". Researchers have expressed more than a hundred different hypotheses of what happened - from an explosion of swamp gas to the wreck of an alien ship. However, none of them fully explains all the features of the disaster.
Hypotheses even had to be classified according to types: man-made, antimatter, geophysical, meteorite, synthetic, and religious. The most common version is the fall of a nucleus or a fragment of a comet to the Earth. Comets are composed primarily of ice and frozen gas, with a small amount of solids interspersed with them, which distinguishes them from completely solid asteroids.
If the nucleus of a comet rushed at supersonic speed, then during its flight ballistic waves would inevitably arise, which fell trees and made sounds resembling thunderclaps. This hypothesis also explains well the absence of a funnel and debris - the ice core warmed up and instantly evaporated at a certain height. Because of this, a large amount of energy was released, comparable to the energy of a nuclear explosion. This explanation was later accepted by a fairly large number of astronomers.
In 1945, the Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev suggested that the Tunguska Meteorite was a spaceship of an extraterrestrial civilization that crashed. However, this version was immediately rejected by astronomers and meteorological specialists. In the journal "Science and Life" published a "devastating article" in which scientists rejected the alien theory of the "Tunguska phenomenon" and argued that a meteorite crater would soon be found.
One of the alternative versions of the "Tunguska phenomenon" is the experiments of the famous physicist Nikola Tesla. According to this hypothesis, on June 30, 1908, Tesla conducted an experiment on the transfer of energy through the air. This version is supported by the fact that a few months before the explosion, Tesla announced his intention to illuminate the road to the north pole of the expedition of the famous traveler Robert Peary.
Also in favor of the Tesla version is the fact that the physicist requested maps of the "least populated parts of Siberia." Records of this have been preserved in the journal of the US Library of Congress. It is also curious that the inhabitants of Canada and Northern Europe noticed noctilucent clouds in the sky that pulsed. The same thing was observed by eyewitnesses of Tesla's experiments in his laboratory in Colorado Springs.
The Tunguska disaster still continues to excite scientists. A number of researchers believe that science has encountered a unique phenomenon still unknown to man, which has yet to be solved. The key link in the study of the nature of the Tunguska meteorite is the question of what was its material composition. However, until now, a substance that could be guaranteed to be identified with the substance of the "Tunguska meteorite" has not been found.