What really happened? Tunguska meteorite. Where is the crater? How many people died when the Tunguska meteorite fell

On June 30, 1908, at about 7 o'clock in the morning, a large fireball flew from the southeast to the northwest in the Earth's atmosphere, which exploded in the Siberian taiga, in the region of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River.

The place where the Tunguska meteorite fell on the map of Russia

A dazzling bright ball was visible in Central Siberia within a radius of 600 kilometers, and heard within a radius of 1000 kilometers. The power of the explosion was later estimated at 10-50 megatons, which corresponds to the energy of two thousand atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, or the energy of the most powerful hydrogen bomb. The air wave was so strong that it knocked down the forest within a radius of 40 kilometers. The total area of ​​fallen forest was about 2,200 square kilometers. And because of the flow of hot gases, the explosion caused a fire that completed the devastation of the surroundings and turned them into a taiga cemetery for many years.

Timbering in the area where the Tunguska meteorite fell

The air wave, generated by an unprecedented explosion, circled the globe twice. It was recorded in seismographic laboratories in Copenhagen, Zagreb, Washington, Potsdam, London, Jakarta and other cities.

A few minutes after the explosion, a magnetic storm began. It lasted for about four hours.

eyewitness accounts

"... suddenly, in the north, the sky split in two, and a fire appeared in it wide and high above the forest, which engulfed the entire northern part of the sky. At that moment, I felt so hot, as if my shirt was on fire. I wanted to tear and throw off my shirt, but the sky slammed shut, and a strong blow was heard. I was thrown three fathoms off the porch. After the blow, there was such a knock, as if stones were falling from the sky or firing from cannons, the earth trembled, and when I lay on the ground, I pressed my head, fearing that stones At that moment, when the sky opened up, a hot wind swept from the north, like from a cannon, which left traces in the form of paths on the ground. Then it turned out that many panes in the windows were broken, and an iron tab for the door lock was broken near the barn ".
Semyon Semyonov, resident of the Vanavara trading post, 70 km from the epicenter of the explosion ("Knowledge is Power", 2003, No. 60)

"On the morning of June 17, at the beginning of the 9th hour, we observed some unusual natural phenomenon. In the village of N.-Karelinsky (200 versts from Kirensk to the north), the peasants saw in the northwest, quite high above the horizon, some extremely strong (it was impossible to look) glowing with a white, bluish light body, moving for 10 minutes from top to bottom. The body was presented in the form of a "pipe", that is, cylindrical. The sky was cloudless, only not high above the horizon, on the same side , in which the luminous body was observed, there was a noticeable small dark cloud. It was hot, dry. Approaching the ground (forest), the shiny body seemed to blur, in its place a huge puff of black smoke formed and an extremely strong knock (not thunder) was heard, as if from large falling stones or cannon fire. All the buildings trembled. At the same time, flames of an indefinite form began to burst out of the cloud. All the inhabitants of the village ran into the streets in panic fear, the women wept, everyone thought that end of the world."
S. Kulesh, Siberia newspaper, July 29 (15), 1908

In the vast space from the Yenisei to the Atlantic coast of Europe, unusual light phenomena unfolded on an unprecedented scale, which went down in history under the name "bright nights of the summer of 1908". The clouds, which formed at an altitude of about 80 km, intensely reflected the sun's rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had never been seen before. Throughout this vast territory, on the evening of June 30, night practically did not fall: the entire sky shone, so that it was possible to read a newspaper at midnight without artificial lighting. This phenomenon continued until July 4th. It is interesting that similar atmospheric anomalies began in 1908 long before the Tunguska explosion: unusual glows, flashes of light and colored lightning were observed over North America and the Atlantic, over Europe and Russia 3 months before the Tunguska explosion.

Later, in the epicenter of the explosion, increased tree growth began, which indicates genetic mutations. Such anomalies are never seen in meteor impact sites, but are very similar to those caused by hard ionizing radiation or strong electromagnetic fields.

A cut of a larch from the area where the Tunguska body fell, cut down in 1958.
The annual layer of 1908 looks dark. Clearly accelerated growth
larches after 1908, when the tree experienced a radiant burn.

Scientific research This phenomenon began only in the 1920s. Place of fall celestial body explored 4 expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and led by Leonid Alekseevich Kulik (1927) and Kirill Pavlovich Florensky (after the Great Patriotic War). The only thing that was found was small silicate and magnetite balls, which, according to scientists, are the product of the destruction of the Tunguska alien. The researchers did not find a characteristic meteor crater, although later, over the long years of searching for the fragments of the Tunguska meteorite, members of various expeditions found a total of 12 wide conical holes in the disaster area. To what depth they go, no one knows, since no one even tried to study them. It was found that around the place where the Tunguska meteorite fell, the forest was blown down like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing on the vine, but without branches and without bark. "It was like a forest of telephone poles."

Subsequent expeditions noticed that the felled forest area was shaped like a butterfly. Computer modeling of the shape of this area, taking into account all the circumstances of the fall, showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth's surface, but even before that, in the air, at a height of 5-10 km, and the weight of the space alien was estimated at 5 million tons.

Scheme of the fall of the forest around the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion
along the "butterfly" with the axis of symmetry AB, taken
for the main direction of the trajectory of the Tunguska meteorite.

More than 100 years have passed since then, but the mystery of the Tunguska phenomenon still remains unsolved.

There are many hypotheses about the nature of the Tunguska meteorite - about 100! None of them provides an explanation for all the phenomena that were observed during the Tunguska phenomenon. Some believe that it was a giant meteorite, others are inclined to believe that it was an asteroid; there are hypotheses about the volcanic origin of the Tunguska phenomenon (the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion surprisingly exactly coincides with the center of the ancient volcano). The hypothesis that the Tunguska meteorite is an extraterrestrial interplanetary ship that crashed in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere is also very popular. This hypothesis was put forward in 1945 by science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev. However, the most plausible hypothesis is recognized by the largest number of researchers that the Tunguska alien was the nucleus or fragment of the nucleus of a comet (Encke's comet is considered the main suspect), which burst into the Earth's atmosphere, heated up from friction against the air and exploded before reaching the earth's surface - that's why no crater. The trees were knocked down by the shock wave from the air explosion, and the ice fragments that fell to the ground simply melted.

Hypotheses about the nature of the Tunguska alien continue to be put forward to this day. So, in 2009, NASA experts suggested that it really was a giant meteorite, but not stone, but ice. This hypothesis explains the absence of traces of the meteorite on Earth and the appearance of noctilucent clouds observed a day after the fall of the Tunguska meteorite to Earth. According to this hypothesis, they appeared as a result of the passage of a meteorite through the dense layers of the atmosphere: in this case, the release of water molecules and ice microparticles began, which led to the formation of noctilucent clouds in the upper atmosphere.

It should be noted that the Americans were not the first to put forward a hypothesis about the icy nature of the Tunguska meteorite: Soviet physicists made such an assumption a quarter of a century ago. However, it became possible to test the plausibility of this hypothesis only with the advent of specialized technology, such as the AIM satellite - it conducted studies of noctilucent clouds in 2007.

This is how the Podkamennaya Tunguska area looks today
Photo: Vitaly Bezrukikh / RIA Novosti

The Tunguska catastrophe is one of the most well-studied, but at the same time the most mysterious phenomena of the 20th century. Dozens of expeditions, hundreds scientific articles, thousands of researchers could only increase knowledge about it, but failed to clearly answer a simple question: what was it?

In the early morning of June 30, 1908, an explosion was heard over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. According to experts, its power was about 2000 times greater than the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Data

In addition to the Tunguska, an amazing phenomenon was also called the Khatanga, Turukhansk and Filimonovsky meteorite. After the explosion, a magnetic disturbance was noted that lasted about 5 hours, and during the flight of the Tunguska fireball, a bright glow was reflected in the northern rooms of nearby villages. According to various estimates, the TNT equivalent of the Tunguska explosion is practically equal to one or two bombs detonated over Hiroshima. Despite the phenomenal nature of what happened, a scientific expedition led by L. A. Kulik to the site of the “meteorite fall” took place only twenty years later.

meteorite theory

The first and most mysterious version lasted until 1958, when a refutation was made public. According to this theory, the Tunguska body is a huge iron or stone meteorite. But even now its echoes haunt contemporaries. Even in 1993, a group of American scientists conducted research, concluding that the object could be a meteorite that exploded at an altitude of about 8 km. It was the traces of a meteorite fall that Leonid Alekseevich and a team of scientists were looking for in the epicenter, although they were embarrassed by the initial absence of a crater and the forest felled by a fan from the center.

fantasy theory

Not only the inquisitive minds of scientists are occupied by the Tunguska riddle. No less interesting is the theory of science fiction writer A.P. Kazantsev, who pointed out the similarity between the events of 1908 and the explosion in Hiroshima. In his original theory, Alexander Petrovich suggested that the fault was the accident and explosion of the nuclear reactor of an interplanetary spacecraft. If we take into account the calculations of A. A. Sternfeld, one of the pioneers of cosmonautics, then it was on June 30, 1908 that a unique opportunity was created for a drone-probe to fly around Mars, Venus and the Earth. The idea was first published in Vokrug Sveta magazine in 1946. Some Western researchers adhere to the same version. F. Edwards wrote that in this catastrophe we lost "a guest from the Universe."

nuclear theory

In 1965 the laureates Nobel Prize, American scientists K. Cowenney and V. Libby developed the idea of ​​their colleague L. Lapaz about the antimatter nature of the Tunguska event. They suggested that as a result of the collision of the Earth and a certain mass of antimatter, annihilation and the release of nuclear energy occurred. The Ural geophysicist A.V. Zolotov analyzed the motion of the fireball, the magnetogram and the nature of the explosion, and stated that only an “internal explosion” of its own energy could lead to such consequences. Despite the arguments of the opponents of the idea, nuclear theory is still the leader in terms of the number of adherents among specialists in the field of the Tunguska problem.

ice comet

One of the latest is the hypothesis of an ice comet, which was put forward by the physicist G. Bybin. The hypothesis arose on the basis of the diaries of the researcher of the Tunguska problem, Leonid Kulik. At the site of the “fall”, the latter found a substance in the form of ice, covered with peat, but did not pay much attention to it. Bybin, on the other hand, states that this compressed ice, found 20 years later at the scene, is not a sign of permafrost, but a direct indication of an icy comet. According to the scientist, the ice comet, consisting of water and carbon, simply scattered about the Earth, touching it at speed, like a hot frying pan.

Blame Tesla?

AT early XXI century, a curious theory appeared, indicating the connection of Nikola Tesla with the Tunguska events. A few months before the incident, Tesla claimed that he could light the way for the traveler Robert Peary to North Pole. Then he asked for maps of "the least populated parts of Siberia." Allegedly on this day, June 30, 1908, Nikola Tesla conducted an experiment with the transfer of energy "through the air." According to the theory, the scientist managed to “rock” the wave filled with the impulse energy of the ether, which resulted in a discharge of incredible power, comparable to an explosion.

Other theories

At the moment, there are several dozen different theories that correspond to various criteria of what happened. Many of them are fantastic and even absurd. For example, the disintegration of a flying saucer or the departure from the ground of a graviobolide are mentioned. A. Olkhovatov, a physicist from Moscow, is absolutely convinced that the 1908 event is a kind of earth quake, and Krasnoyarsk researcher D. Timofeev explained that the cause was an explosion of natural gas, which was set on fire by a meteorite that flew into the atmosphere. American scientists M. Rian and M. Jackson stated that the destruction was caused by a collision with a "black hole", and physicists V. Zhuravlev and M. Dmitriev believe that the breakthrough of a solar plasma clot and the subsequent explosion of several thousand ball lightnings are to blame. For more than 100 years since the incident, it was not possible to come to a single hypothesis. None of the proposed versions could fully meet all the proven and irrefutable criteria, such as the passage of a high-altitude body, a powerful explosion, an air wave, a burn of trees at the epicenter, atmospheric optical anomalies, magnetic disturbances, and the accumulation of isotopes in the soil.
Often the versions were based on unusual finds taken near the study area. In 1993, a corresponding member of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts, Yu. Lavbin, as part of a research expedition of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon public foundation (now he is its president), discovered unusual stones near Krasnoyarsk, and in 1976 they discovered in the Komi ASSR "your iron", recognized as a fragment of a cylinder or sphere with a diameter of 1.2 m. Often mentioned and anomalous zone"devil's cemetery" with an area of ​​about 250 sq.m, located in the Angara taiga of the Kezhemsky district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. In the area formed by something "falling from the sky", plants and animals die, people prefer to bypass it. The consequences of the June morning of 1908 also include the unique geological object Patomsky crater, located in the Irkutsk region and discovered in 1949 by geologist V.V. Kolpakov. The height of the cone is about 40 meters, the diameter along the ridge is about 76 meters.

On June 30, 1908, an explosion thundered in the air over a dense forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. They say the fireball was 50-100 meters wide. He destroyed 2,000 square kilometers of taiga, knocking down 80 million trees. More than a hundred years have passed since then - it was the most powerful explosion in recorded human history - but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Then the earth shook. In the nearest city, 60 kilometers away, glass flew out of the windows. Residents even felt the heat of the explosion.

Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely populated. No one was killed, according to the reports, only one local reindeer herder died after being thrown into a tree by an explosion. Hundreds of deer also turned into charred carcasses.

One of the eyewitnesses said that “the sky split in two and, high above the forest, the entire northern part of the sky was engulfed in fire. And then there was an explosion in the sky and a powerful crack. It was followed by a noise, as if stones were falling from the sky or cannons were being fired.

The Tunguska meteorite - this is how this event was dubbed - became the most powerful in history: it produced 185 more energy than atomic bomb in Hiroshima (and according to some estimates, even more). Seismic waves were registered even in the UK.

However, a hundred years later, scientists are still wondering what exactly happened on that fateful day. Many are convinced that it was an asteroid or a comet. But practically no traces of a large extraterrestrial object were found - only traces of an explosion - which paved the way for a variety of theories (including a conspiracy).

Tunguska is far away in Siberia, and the climate there is not the best. Long, wicked winters and very short summers, when the soil turns into a muddy and unpleasant swamp. It is very difficult to move around in this area.

When the explosion was heard, no one dared to investigate the scene. Natalya Artemyeva of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, says the Russian authorities had more pressing problems at the time to idly gratify scientific curiosity.

Political passions in the country were growing - First World War and the revolution happened very soon. “Even in the local newspapers, there were not many publications, not to mention St. Petersburg and Moscow,” she says.

A few decades later, in 1927, a team led by Leonid Kulik finally visited the site of the explosion. He came across a description of the event six years earlier and convinced the authorities that the trip would be worth the trouble. Once in place, Kulik, even twenty years after the explosion, found obvious traces of the disaster.

He found a huge area of ​​fallen trees that stretched for 50 kilometers in a strange butterfly shape. The scientist suggested that a meteor from outer space exploded in the atmosphere. But he was embarrassed that the meteor did not leave any crater - and indeed, the meteor itself did not remain. To explain this, Kulik suggested that the unsteady ground was too soft to retain impact marks, and hence the debris left after the impact was also buried.

Kulik did not lose hope of finding the remains of a meteorite, which he wrote about in 1938. “We could find at a depth of 25 meters crushed masses of this nickel iron, individual pieces of which could weigh one hundred to two hundred metric tons.”

Russian researchers later stated that it was a comet and not a meteor. Comets are large chunks of ice, not rock like meteorites, so this could explain the lack of rock fragments. The ice began to evaporate already at the entrance to the Earth's atmosphere and continued to evaporate until the very moment of the collision.

But the controversy didn't stop there. Because the exact nature of the explosion was unclear, outlandish theories continued to emerge one after another. Some have suggested that the Tunguska meteorite was the result of a collision of matter and antimatter. When this happens, the particles annihilate and release a lot of energy.

Another suggestion was that the explosion was nuclear. An even more ridiculous proposal blamed an alien ship that crashed in search of fresh water on Lake Baikal.

As expected, none of these theories worked. And in 1958, an expedition to the site of the explosion found tiny remains of silicate and magnetite in the soil.

Further analysis showed that they were rich in nickel, which is often found in meteorite rock. Everything indicated that it was a meteorite, and K. Florensky, the author of a report on this event from 1963, really wanted to cut off other, more fantastic theories:

“While I understand the benefits of sensationalizing this issue, it should be emphasized that this unhealthy interest, which has arisen as a result of misrepresentation of facts and misinformation, should never be used as a basis for promoting scientific knowledge.”

But that hasn't stopped others from coming up with even more dubious ideas. In 1973, an article was published in the authoritative journal Nature, which suggested that the collision of a black hole with the Earth led to this explosion. The theory was quickly challenged.

Artemieva says ideas like this are a common by-product of human psychology. "People who love mysteries and 'theories' tend not to listen to scientists," she says. The big bang, combined with the scarcity of space remains, is fertile ground for this kind of speculation. She also says that scientists should take some responsibility, because they took too long to analyze the site of the explosion. They were more concerned with larger asteroids that could cause global extinctions, like the asteroid that left the Chicxulub crater. Thanks to him, dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago.

In 2013, a group of scientists put an end to much of the previous decades' speculation. Led by Viktor Krasnytsia from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, scientists analyzed microscopic samples of stones collected from the site of the explosion in 1978. The stones were of meteoric origin. Most importantly, the analyzed fragments were extracted from a layer of peat that was collected back in 1908.

These samples found traces of a carbon mineral - lonsdaleite - whose crystal structure resembles diamond. This particular mineral is formed when a graphite-containing structure like a meteorite crashes into the Earth.

“Our study of samples from Tunguska, as well as studies by many other authors, showed the meteorite origin of the Tunguska event,” says Krasnytsya. “We believe that nothing paranormal happened in Tunguska.”

The main problem, he says, is that researchers have spent too much time looking for large chunks of rock. "We had to look for very small particles," like the ones his group was studying.

But this conclusion was not final either. Meteor showers happen frequently. Many small meteorites could have hit Earth undetected. Samples of meteorite origin could well go this way. Some scholars have also questioned whether the peat was collected in 1908.

Even Artemyeva says she needs to revise her models to understand the complete absence of meteorites in Tunguska. And yet, consistent with Leonid Kulik's early observations, today's broad consensus implies that the Podkamennaya Tunguska event was caused by a large cosmic body, an asteroid or a comet, that collided with the Earth's atmosphere.

Most asteroids have fairly stable orbits; many of them are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, "different gravitational interactions can cause their orbits to change dramatically," says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, UK.

From time to time, these solid bodies can intersect with the Earth's orbit, and hence collide with our planet. The moment such a body enters the atmosphere and begins to disintegrate, it becomes a meteor.

The event in Podkamennaya Tunguska is interesting to scientists because it was an extremely rare case of a "megaton" event - the energy emitted during the explosion was equal to 10-15 megatons of TNT, and this is according to the most conservative estimates.

This also explains why the event was difficult to fully comprehend. This is the only event of this magnitude that has happened in recent history. “So our understanding is limited,” Collins says.

Artemyeva says there are clear milestones, which she outlined in a review to be published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the second half of 2016.

First, the space body entered our atmosphere at a speed of 15-30 km/s.

Fortunately, our atmosphere protects us perfectly. "It will tear apart a rock smaller than a football field across," explains NASA researcher Bill Cook, head of meteoroids at NASA. “Most people think that these rocks come to us from outer space and leave craters, and above them a column of smoke will hang. But it's quite the opposite."

The atmosphere tends to break up rocks a few kilometers above the Earth's surface, producing a rain of small rocks that will cool down by the time they hit the ground. In the case of Tunguska, the flying meteor had to be extremely fragile, or the explosion was so powerful that it destroyed all its remnants 8-10 kilometers above the Earth.

This process explains the second stage of the event. The atmosphere vaporized the object into tiny pieces, and at the same time intense kinetic energy turned them into heat.

“This process is analogous to a chemical explosion. In modern explosions, chemical or nuclear energy is converted into heat,” says Artemyeva.

In other words, whatever remnants of whatever entered the Earth's atmosphere became cosmic dust.

If everything was so, it becomes clear why there are no giant fragments of cosmic matter at the crash site. “On this whole large area it is difficult to find even a millimeter grain. We need to look in the peat,” says Krasnytsya.

As the object entered the atmosphere and broke apart, the intense heat created a shock wave that traveled hundreds of kilometers. When this air blast hit the ground, it knocked down all the trees in the area.

Artemyeva suggests that this was followed by a giant plume and a cloud "thousands of kilometers in diameter."

And yet the history of the Tunguska meteorite does not end there. Even now, some scientists say we are missing the obvious when trying to explain this event.

In 2007, a group of Italian scientists suggested that a lake 8 kilometers north-northwest of the epicenter of the explosion could be an impact crater. Lake Cheko, they say, was not marked on any map before this event.

Luca Gaserini of the University of Bologna in Italy traveled to the lake in the late 1990s and says it's hard to explain the lake's origins in any other way. “Now we are sure that it was formed after the impact, but not from the main body of the Tunguska asteroid, but from its fragment that survived the explosion.”

Gasperini firmly believes that most of the asteroid lies 10 meters below the bottom of the lake, buried under bottom sediments. “The Russians could easily go there and drill the bottom,” he says. Despite serious criticism of this theory, he hopes that someone will extract traces of meteorite origin from the lake.

Lake Cheka as an impact crater is not the most popular idea. It's just another "quasi-theory," says Artemyeva. "Any mysterious object at the bottom of the lake could be retrieved with minimal effort - the lake is not deep," she says. Collins also disagrees with Gasperini.

Without talking about the details, we still feel the consequences of the Tunguska event. Scientists continue to publish work.

Astronomers can peer into the sky with powerful telescopes and look for signs of other similar rocks that could also cause massive damage.

In 2013, a relatively small meteor (19 meters in diameter) that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia left significant damage. This surprises scientists like Collins. According to his models, such a meteor should not cause any damage at all.

“The complexity of this process is that the asteroid breaks down in the atmosphere, slows down, evaporates and transfers energy to the air, all this is difficult to model. We would like to learn more about this process in order to better predict the consequences of such events in the future.”

Meteors the size of Chelyabinsk fall about every hundred years, and the size of Tunguska - once every thousand years. It was thought so before. Now these figures need to be revised. Perhaps the "Chelyabinsk meteors" fall ten times more often, says Collins, and the "Tunguska" ones arrive once every 100-200 years.

Unfortunately, we are defenseless in the face of such events, says Krasnytsya. If a Tunguska-like event were to occur over a populated city, thousands if not millions of people would die, depending on the epicenter.

But it's not all bad. The likelihood that this will happen is extremely small, according to Collins, given the huge surface area of ​​​​the Earth that is covered with water. Most likely, the meteorite will fall far from where people live.

We may never know whether the Tunguska meteorite was a meteor or a comet, but in a sense it doesn't matter. The important thing is that we are talking about this a hundred years later, and we really care about it. Both of these can lead to disaster.

Even a few days before the meteorite fell, people around the world noted strange phenomena that foreshadowed that something unusual was coming. In Russia, the subjects of the emperor watched with surprise the silvery clouds, as if illuminated from within. In England, astronomers wrote with bewilderment about the onset of "white night" - a phenomenon unknown in these latitudes. The anomalies lasted about three days - and then the day of the fall came.

Computer simulation of the approach of the Tunguska meteorite to the Earth

June 30, 1908 at 7:15 local time, a meteorite entered the upper atmosphere of the Earth. Having become hot from friction against the air, it began to glow so brightly that this radiance was noticeable at a great distance. People who saw a fireball flying across the sky described it as a burning elongated object, rapidly and noisily crossing the sky. And then, in the area of ​​​​the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, about 60 kilometers north of the Evenki camp of Vanavara, an explosion occurred.

It turned out to be so powerful that it could be heard at a distance of more than 1000 kilometers from Podkamennaya Tunguska. In a few villages and camps within a radius of almost 300 kilometers, glass was knocked out by a shock wave, and an earthquake provoked by a meteorite was recorded by seismographic stations in Central Asia, in the Caucasus and even in Germany. The explosion uprooted centuries-old trees on an area of ​​2.2 thousand square meters. km. Light and heat radiation, which accompanied it, led to the emergence forest fire that completed the picture of destruction. On that day, in the vast territory of our planet, night did not come.

The power of the meteorite explosion was like that of a hydrogen bomb

The clouds formed after the fall of a meteorite at an altitude of 80 km reflected light, filling the sky with an unusual glow, so bright that it was possible to read without any additional lighting. Never before had people seen anything like it.

Another anomaly worthy of attention was the recorded outrage magnetic field Earth: real magnetic storms raged on the planet for five days.

Until now, scientists cannot come to a consensus on what the Tunguska meteorite was. Many believe that it would be more correct to call it "Tunguska comet", "Tunguska test of weapons of mass destruction" and even "Tunguska UFO". About the nature of this phenomenon, there are a huge number of both scientific and esoteric theories. More than a hundred different hypotheses were expressed about what happened in the Tunguska taiga: from the explosion of swamp gas to the crash of an alien ship. It was also assumed that an iron or stone meteorite with the inclusion of nickel iron could fall to the Earth; the icy nucleus of a comet; unidentified flying object, starship; giant ball lightning; meteorite from Mars, hard to distinguish from terrestrial rocks. American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan said that the Earth met with a "black hole".

In Lem's novel, the meteorite is presented as an alien spy ship.

Some researchers suggested that it was a fantastic laser beam or a piece of plasma torn off from the Sun. French astronomer Felix de Roy, a researcher of optical anomalies, suggested that on June 30, the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust. However, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still a meteorite that exploded above the Earth's surface.

It was his traces, starting in 1927, that the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik were looking for in the explosion area. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene. Expeditions found that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing on the vine, but without branches. Subsequent expeditions noticed that the felled forest area has a characteristic “butterfly” shape, directed from east-southeast to west-northwest. Modeling the shape of this area and calculating all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth's surface, but even before that in the air at a height of 5-10 km.

The fall of the Tunguska meteorite

In 1988, members of the research expedition of the Siberian Public Foundation "Tunguska Space Phenomenon" led by Yuri Lavbin discovered metal rods near Vanavara.

Lovebin put forward his version of what happened - a huge comet was approaching our planet from space. Some highly developed space civilization became aware of this. Aliens, in order to save the Earth from a global catastrophe, sent their sentinel spaceship. He had to split the comet. But, unfortunately, the attack of the most powerful cosmic body was not entirely successful for the ship. True, the nucleus of the comet crumbled into several fragments. Some of them hit the Earth, and most of them passed by our planet. The earthlings were saved, but one of the fragments damaged the attacking alien ship, and he made an emergency landing on Earth. Subsequently, the crew of the ship repaired their car and safely left our planet, leaving the failed blocks on it, the remains of which were found by the expedition to the crash site.

Vyborg and Petersburg could become victims of the Tunguska meteorite

Over the years of searching for the wreckage of a space alien, members of various expeditions have found a total of 12 wide conical holes in the disaster area. To what depth they go, no one knows, since no one even tried to study them. All these facts allowed geophysicists to reasonably assume that a careful study of conical holes in the earth would shed light on the Siberian mystery. Some scientists have already begun to express the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe earthly origin of the phenomenon.

The site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite

In 2006, according to Yuri Lavbin, in the area of ​​the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, Krasnoyarsk researchers discovered quartz cobblestones with mysterious inscriptions. According to the researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made way, presumably with the help of plasma exposure. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones, which were studied in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Studies have confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are "jointed" layers of plates, each of which is marked with characters of an unknown alphabet. According to Lovebin's hypothesis, quartz cobblestones are fragments of an information container sent to our planet by an extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.

The most recent hypothesis is the physicist Gennady Bybin, who has been studying the Tunguska anomaly for more than 30 years. Bybin believes that the mysterious body was not a stone meteorite, but an icy comet. He came to this conclusion based on the diaries of the first researcher of the meteorite fall site, Leonid Kulik. At the scene of the incident, Kulik found a substance in the form of ice covered with peat, but did not give it special significance because I was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with combustible gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but evidence that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that shattered into many pieces from a collision with our planet, the Earth became a kind of hot frying pan. The ice on it quickly melted and exploded. Gennady Bybin hopes that his version will be the only true and last one.

Alleged fragments of the Tunguska meteorite

There are those who believe that Nikola Tesla's intervention could not have happened here: the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite could be the result of an experiment by a brilliant scientist on wireless transmission of energy over a distance. Tesla allegedly specifically chose sparsely populated Siberia as a test site, where there was a minimal risk of causing human casualties. Redirecting huge energy with the help of his experimental setup, he released it over the taiga, which led to a powerful explosion. Despite the apparent success of this experiment, Tesla did not report his breakthrough in the study of energy, apparently afraid that his discovery could be used as a weapon. This scientist, known for his anti-militarism, could not allow it.

The fall of the Tunguska meteorite

Fall year

On June 30, 1908, a mysterious object exploded and fell in the earth's atmosphere, later called the Tunguska meteorite.

Place of fall

The territory of Eastern Siberia in the interfluve of the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska forever remained as the place of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, when, flaring up like the sun, and flying several hundred kilometers, a fiery object fell on it.

In 2006, according to the President of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Foundation Yuri Lavbin, Krasnoyarsk researchers discovered quartz cobblestones with mysterious writings in the area of ​​the Podkamennaya Tunguska River at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.

According to the researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made way, presumably with the help of plasma exposure. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones, which were studied in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Studies have confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are fused layers of plates, each of which is marked with characters of an unknown alphabet. According to Lovebin's hypothesis, quartz cobblestones are fragments of an information container sent to our planet by an extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.

Hypotheses

More than a hundred different hypotheses were expressed about what happened in the Tunguska taiga: from the explosion of swamp gas to the crash of an alien ship. It was also assumed that an iron or stone meteorite with the inclusion of nickel iron could fall to the Earth; the icy nucleus of a comet; unidentified flying object, starship; giant ball lightning; meteorite from Mars, hard to distinguish from terrestrial rocks. American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan declared that the Earth met with a "black hole"; some researchers suggested that it was a fantastic laser beam or a piece of plasma detached from the Sun; French astronomer Felix de Roy, a researcher of optical anomalies, suggested that on June 30, the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust.

1. Ice Comet
The most recent is the ice comet hypothesis put forward by physicist Gennady Bybin, who has been studying the Tunguska anomaly for more than 30 years. Bybin believes that the mysterious body was not a stone meteorite, but an icy comet. He came to this conclusion based on the diaries of Leonid Kulik, the first researcher of the meteorite fall site. At the scene of the incident, Kulik found a substance in the form of ice covered with peat, but did not attach much importance to it, since he was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with combustible gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but evidence that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that shattered into many pieces from a collision with our planet, the Earth became a kind of hot frying pan. The ice on it quickly melted and exploded. Gennady Bybin hopes that his version will be the only true and last one.

2.Meteorite
however, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still a meteorite that exploded above the surface of the Earth. It was his traces, starting from 1927, that the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik were looking for in the explosion area. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene. Expeditions found that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing on the vine, but without branches.