Kemerovo

Tomsk

Kyzyl

Gorno-Altaisk

Novosibirsk

Irkutsk

Tyumen

Moscow

Ust-Kut

Omsk

Surgut

Abakan

Chelyabinsk

Tunguska meteorite as imagined by an artist

There are a lot of space legends in the Russian-speaking space. Almost every village has a hill above which mysterious lights were seen in the sky, or a hollow left by a “comet”. But the most famous (and actually existing!) remains the Tunguska meteorite. Having descended from heaven on the unremarkable morning of June 30, 1908, he instantly laid down 2000 km²taiga, broke out the windows of houses hundreds of kilometers around.

Explosion near Tunguska

However, the space guest behaved very strangely. It exploded in the air, several times, did not leave a trace, and the forest fell to the ground without a blow. This ignited the imagination of both science fiction writers and scientists - since then, at least once a year, a new version of what caused the explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River appears. Today we will explain what the Tunguska meteorite is from an astronomy point of view; photos from the fall sites will become our guides.

The most important, the very first and most unreliable information about a meteorite is the description of the meteorite fall. The whole planet felt it - the wind reached Britain, and the earthquake swept across Eurasia. But only a few personally saw the largest fall of a cosmic body. And only those who survived could tell about it.

The most reliable witnesses say that a huge fiery tail flew from north to east, at an angle of 50° to the horizon. After this, the northern part of the sky lit up with a flash that brought great heat: people tore off their clothes, and dry plants and fabrics began to smolder. This was the explosion - more precisely, thermal radiation from it. The shock wave with wind and seismic vibrations came later, knocking trees and people to the ground, breaking windows even at a distance of 200 kilometers!

Strong thunder, the sound of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, came last, and resembled the roar of cannon fire. Immediately after this, a second explosion occurred, less powerful; Most of the eyewitnesses, stunned by the heat and shock wave, noticed only its light, which they described as a “second Sun.”

This is where the reliable testimony ends. It is worth taking into account the early hour of the meteorite fall and the identities of the eyewitnesses - these were Siberian peasant settlers and aborigines, Tungus and Evenki. The latter in their pantheon of gods have iron birds that spit fire, which gave the stories of eyewitnesses a religious connotation, and ufologists - “reliable evidence” of the presence of a spaceship at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.

Journalists also did their best: the newspapers wrote that the meteorite fell right next to the railway, and train passengers saw a space rock, the top of which was sticking out of the ground. Subsequently, it was they, in close connection with science fiction writers, who created a myth with many faces, in which the Tunguska meteorite was both a product of energy, and interplanetary transport, and Nikola Tesla’s experiment.

Tunguska myths

The Chelyabinsk meteorite, the younger brother of the Tunguska meteorite in chemical composition and fate, was filmed by hundreds of cameras during its fall, and scientists quickly found solid remains of the body - but there were still people who promoted the version of its supernatural origin. And the first expedition to the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall was undertaken 13 years after the fall. During this time, new undergrowth managed to grow, streams dried up or turned their course, and eyewitnesses left their home on the waves of the recent revolution.

One way or another, Leonid Kulik, a well-known mineralogist and meteorite expert in the Soviet Union, led the first search for the Tunguska meteorite in 1921. Before his death in 1942, he organized 4 (according to other sources - 6) expeditions, promising the country's leadership meteorite iron. However, he found neither a crater nor the remains of a meteorite.

So, where did the meteorite go, and where to look for it? Below we will look at the main features of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite and the myths generated by them.

“The Tunguska meteorite exploded stronger than the most powerful nuclear bomb”

The force of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, according to the latest calculations of supercomputers at the US Sandia National Laboratory, was “only” 3–5 megatons of TNT. Although this is more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, it is much less than the monstrous 30 - 50 megatons that appear in the data about the Tunguska meteorite. Previous generations of scientists were let down by an incorrect understanding of the mechanism of a meteorite explosion. The energy did not spread evenly in all directions, as during the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but was directed to the earth in the direction of movement of the cosmic body.

“The Tunguska meteorite disappeared without a trace”

The crater from the Tunguska meteorite was never found, which gave rise to a lot of speculation on this topic. However, should there be a crater at all? Above, it was not for nothing that we called Tungussky’s younger brother - it also exploded in the air, and its main part, weighing several hundred kilograms, was found at the bottom of the lake only thanks to multiple video recordings. This happened due to its loose, loose composition - it was either a “heap of rubble”, an asteroid made up of saws and individual parts, or part of it. Having lost most of the mass and energy in an air flash, the Tunguska meteorite could not have left a large crater, but in the 13 years separating the date of the fall and the first expedition, this crater could itself turn into a lake.

In 2007, scientists from the University of Bologna managed to find the crater of the Tunguska meteorite - theoretically, it is Lake Cheko, which lies 7-8 kilometers from the site of the explosion. It has a regular ellipsoidal shape, directed towards the forest felled by the meteorite, a conical shape, characteristic of impact craters, its age is equal to how long ago the meteorite fell, and magnetic studies show the presence of a dense object at the bottom. The lake is still being studied, and perhaps soon the Tunguska meteorite itself, the culprit of all the commotion, will appear in the exhibition halls.

Leonid Kulik, by the way, was looking for such lakes, but near the crash site. However, science was then unaware of the descriptions of meteorite explosions in the air - the remains of the Chelyabinsk meteorite flew quite far from the explosion site. Having drained one of the “promising” lakes, the scientist found at its bottom... a tree stump. This incident gave rise to a comic description of the Tunguska meteorite as “an oblong cylindrical object in the form of a log, made from a special type of cosmic wood.” Later, there were fans of sensations who took this story seriously.

“The Tunguska meteorite created Tesla”

Many pseudoscientific theories about the Tunguska meteorite originated from jokes or incorrectly interpreted statements. This is how Nikola Tesla became involved in the meteorite story. In 1908, he promised to light the way in Antarctica for Robert Peary, one of the two people credited with leading the way to the Arctic Pole.

It is logical to assume that Tesla, as the founder of the modern alternating current electrical network, had in mind some more practical method than creating an explosion at a considerable distance from Robert Peary's path in Siberia, maps of which he allegedly requested. At the same time, Tesla himself argued that transmission over long distances can only be done using ether waves. However, the absence of ether as a medium for the interaction of electromagnetic waves was proven after the death of the great inventor.

This is not the only fiction about the Tunguska meteorite that is being passed off as truth today. There are people who believe in the version of “an alien ship moving back in time” - only it was first introduced in the humorous novel by the Strugatsky brothers “Monday Begins on Saturday”. And the participants of Kulik’s expeditions, bitten by the taiga midge, wrote about billions of mosquitoes that gathered into one large ball, and their heat generated a burst of energy with a power of megatons. Thank God, this theory did not fall into the hands of the yellow press.

“The site of the Tunguska meteorite explosion is an anomalous place”

At first they thought so because they did not find either a crater or a meteorite - however, this is explained by the fact that it exploded completely in, and its fragments had much less energy, and therefore were lost in the vast taiga. But there are always “inconsistencies” that allow you to idly fantasize about the Tunguska meteorite. We will analyze them now.

• The most important “proof” of the supernatural nature of the Tunguska meteorite is that in the summer of 1908, supposedly before the fall of the cosmic body, glows and white nights appeared across Europe and Asia. Yes, one could say that any low-density meteorite or comet has a dust plume that enters the atmosphere before the body itself. However, a study of scientific reports on atmospheric anomalies in the summer of 1908 showed that all these phenomena appeared in early July - that is, after the meteorite fell. This is the consequence of blindly trusting headlines.
• They also note that in the center of the meteorite explosion, trees without branches and foliage remained standing, like pillars. This, however, is typical for any powerful atmospheric explosions - surviving houses and pagodas remained in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and at the very epicenter of the explosion. The movement of the meteorite and its destruction in the atmosphere knocked down trees in the shape of a butterfly, which also caused bewilderment at first. However, the already notorious Chelyabinsk meteorite left the same mark; There are butterfly craters even on. These mysteries were solved only in the second half of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons appeared in the world.

This house was located 260 meters from the epicenter of the explosion in Hiroshima. There weren't even any walls left from the houses.

• The last phenomenon is an increase in the growth of trees in the place of a forest felled by an explosion, which is more characteristic of electromagnetic and radiation bursts than of thermal bursts. The strong explosion of the meteorite definitely took place in several dimensions at once, and the fact that trees began to grow quickly in fertile soil exposed to the sun is not at all surprising. Thermal radiation itself and injury to trees also affects growth - just as scars grow on the skin at the site of wounds. Meteorite additives could also accelerate the development of plants: many iron and silicate balls and fragments from an explosion were found in the wood.

Thus, in the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, only the power of nature and the uniqueness of the phenomenon are surprising, but not the supernatural overtones. Science is developing and penetrating into people's lives - and using satellite television, satellite navigation and looking at images of deep space, they no longer believe in the firmament and do not mistake astronauts in white spacesuits for angels. And in the future, much more amazing things await us than the fall of meteorites - the same plains of Mars untouched by man.

The fall of the Tunguska meteorite

Year of the fall

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

Crash site

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

In 2006, according to the president of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Foundation, 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 researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made manner, presumably through the influence of plasma. 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. Research has confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are fused layers of plates, each of which contains signs of an unknown alphabet. According to Lavbin'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 have been expressed about what happened in the Tunguska taiga: from an explosion of swamp gas to the crash of an alien ship. It was also assumed that an iron or stone meteorite containing nickel iron could have fallen to Earth; icy comet core; unidentified flying object, starship; giant ball lightning; a meteorite from Mars, difficult to distinguish from terrestrial rocks. American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan stated that the Earth encountered a “black hole”; some researchers suggested that it was a fantastic laser beam or a piece of plasma torn off from the Sun; French astronomer and researcher of optical anomalies Felix de Roy suggested that on June 30 the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust.

1. Ice comet
The latest 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 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 attach much importance to it, since he was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with flammable gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but proof that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that was scattered into many pieces after 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 become 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 that, starting in 1927, were searched for in the area of ​​the explosion by the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene of the incident. Expeditions discovered 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, but without branches.

110 years ago the famous Tunguska meteorite fell in Siberia. Why it is called the “Tunguska phenomenon”, what eyewitnesses saw, how the research was carried out and how it influenced popular culture, Gazeta.Ru looked into it.

The mysterious explosion that occurred in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on the morning of June 30, 1908, exactly 110 years ago, continues to excite the minds of researchers. This event is noteworthy because it is considered the largest fall of a celestial body to Earth in recent history. It is also fascinating in its mystery - after all, reliable large fragments of the “meteorite” were never found, despite long searches and many expeditions.

Many people prefer the “Tunguska cosmic body” or even the “Tunguska phenomenon” to the traditional “Tunguska meteorite.”

Of course, people were lucky that the fall of a cosmic body happened in a deserted area. In densely populated areas, numerous casualties could not be avoided, because, according to experts, the power of the explosion corresponded to the most powerful of the exploded hydrogen bombs, and the affected area was comparable to the size of modern Moscow.

The much smaller Chelyabinsk meteorite, which fell on February 15, 2013, became famous not only for leaving numerous recordings on video recorders, but also for hundreds or thousands of victims, broken windows and other destruction.

Why do they speak first of all about the cosmic origin of the phenomenon? First of all, thanks to reliable observations of the fall of a bright fireball moving in the server direction, which ended with a powerful explosion. The blast wave was recorded throughout the world, including in the Western Hemisphere, and a seismic wave and magnetic storm were also recorded. For several days after this, an intense glow of the sky and luminous clouds were observed over a vast area.

The first expeditions to that inaccessible area and interviews with real witnesses were not immediately organized.

The Soviet scientist Leonid Kulik became a great enthusiast for studying the Tunguska phenomenon. In 1927–1939, he organized and led several expeditions, the main purpose of which was to search for the remains of the “meteorite”. However, the first expedition, organized by him with the support of academicians Vernadsky and Fersman back in 1921, was limited only to the collected eyewitness accounts, which made it possible to clarify the crash site itself.

And the planned next expedition in 1941 did not take place due to the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Kulik then volunteered for the people’s militia, was wounded, captured by the Germans and died in a Nazi camp in a typhoid barracks.

It was Kulik’s expedition that made it possible to establish that in the place where the meteorite supposedly fell, a forest had been felled over a large area (about 2000 km²), and at the epicenter the trees remained standing, devoid of branches and bark. However, there was a snag with the search for the expected crater, which over time grew into one of the “main scientific mysteries of the century.” For some time, Kulik assumed that the crater was hidden by a swamp, but even then it became clear that the destruction of the main body of the “meteorite” occurred in the air above the taiga, at a height of five or ten kilometers.

The collected eyewitness accounts are interesting. Semyon Semenov, a resident of the Vanavara trading post (70 km southeast of the epicenter of the explosion), spoke about this event as follows: “... 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 there was a strong blow. 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 guns were firing, the ground shook, and when I was lying on the ground, I pressed my head, fearing that the stones would break my head. At that moment, when the sky opened, a hot wind rushed from the north, like from a cannon, which left traces in the form of paths on the ground. Then it turned out that many of the windows were broken, and the iron bar for the door lock was broken.”

Even closer to the epicenter were the Evenk brothers Chuchanchi and Chekarena Shanyagir (their tent was located 30 km to the southeast): “We heard a whistle and sensed a strong wind. Chekaren also shouted to me: “Do you hear how many goldeneyes or mergansers are flying?” We were still in the plague and we couldn’t see what was happening in the forest... Behind the plague there was some noise, we could hear the trees falling. Chekaren and I got out of the bags and were about to jump out of the chum, but suddenly thunder struck very hard. This was the first blow. The earth began to twitch and sway, a strong wind hit our chum and knocked it down.

There is smoke all around, it hurts your eyes, it’s hot, very hot, you could burn. Suddenly, over the mountain where the forest had already fallen, it became very light, and, how can I tell you, as if a second sun had appeared, the Russians would say: “Suddenly it suddenly flashed,” my eyes began to hurt, and I even closed them. It looked like what the Russians call “lightning”. And immediately there was agdylyan, strong thunder. This was the second blow. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our sun was shining brightly, as always, and then a second sun appeared!”

The most authoritative theories of the Tunguska phenomenon agree that some large body that came to us from space exploded in the air over Podkamennaya Tunguska. Only the descriptions of its properties, origin, model (at what angle it entered) differ. It could be a fragment of an asteroid or comet, and it could consist of ice or stones, but most likely we are still talking about something non-monolithic, porous, like pumice, otherwise large fragments would have already been discovered.

The comet hypothesis arose back in the 1930s, and even in our time, experts, including those at NASA, agree that the Tunguska meteorite consisted mainly of ice. This is evidenced by the rainbow stripes that followed this body (according to the descriptions of some eyewitnesses), and the noctilucent clouds observed a day after the fall. The majority of Russian researchers share the same opinion. This hypothesis is confirmed quite reliably by numerical calculations carried out repeatedly.

Of course, the “meteorite” material did not consist of pure ice, and something fell to the ground after the explosion, but most of the original material was still distributed in the atmosphere or dispersed over a vast area. This decay pattern explains the presence of two successive shock waves that were reported by witnesses to the explosion.

Even Kulik’s expedition found microscopic silicate and magnetite balls at the crash site and recorded an increased content of elements indicating the possible cosmic origin of the fallen material. In 2013, the journal Planetary and Space Science reported that microscopic samples discovered by Nikolai Kovalykh in 1978 in the Podkamennaya Tunguska region revealed the presence of forms of carbon formed under high pressure and associated with the fall of extraterrestrial bodies - lonsdaleite, as well as troilite ( iron sulfide), taenite, etc.

Some noise arose in connection with the story of the "Italians in Russia" who explored Lake Checo eleven years ago. This is a 500-meter lake, located 8 km north of the supposed epicenter of the explosion in a remote uninhabited area, it has a rather strange and round shape. It was already studied in the 1960s, but then it did not generate much interest. It is still not known for sure whether Lake Cheko existed before 1908 (the presence of the lake is not noted on any map of that time).

Previously, it was believed that Cheko was either of karst origin, or an ancient volcanic crater, or created by the Kimchu River flowing into it.

The Italians, led by geologist Luca Gasperini from the Institute of Marine Geology in Bologna, analyzing sedimentary rocks, stated that the age of the lake is around one century, that is, approximately corresponds to the time of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.

Gasperini claims that the unusual shape of the lake is the result of a large fragment hitting the ground, thrown aside during the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite and plowing the soil at an angle, which allowed the fragment to create a pit of the appropriate shape.

“We assume that the 10-meter, 1,500-ton fragment escaped destruction during the explosion and continued to fly in its original direction,” says Gasperini. - It moved relatively slowly, at a speed of approximately 1 km/s. The lake is located exactly on the likely path of the cosmic body. This fragment sank into soft, marshy soil and melted a layer of permafrost, releasing a certain amount of carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane, which widened the original gap, giving the lake a shape not quite typical of an impact crater. Our hypothesis is the only reasonable explanation for the funnel-shaped bottom of Lake Cheko.”

The work of Italian researchers caused a great resonance in the scientific community, many were skeptical about it, but in essence it still does not change anything regarding the origin of the bulk of the cosmic body that exploded in another place. And Gasperini himself states that their hypothesis is compatible with almost any previous option: “If the object was an asteroid, then the surviving fragment could be buried under the lake. And if it was a comet, then its chemical signature should be found in the deepest layers of sediments.”

One way or another, the Tunguska meteorite and its next anniversary are an event of global importance, for which they were preparing not only in Russia.

However, the Tunguska meteorite not only contributes to the emergence of a keen interest in science among the general public and serves as a formidable reminder of the dangers threatening us from space. It has become a kind of calling card for various kinds of scientific charlatans who are ready to exploit interest in the mystery and produce irresponsible theories. They tried to connect the “Tunguska phenomenon” with ball lightning, a sudden volcanic eruption induced by an earthquake, the explosion of a methane bubble, the invasion of antimatter, microscopic black holes, as well as the accident of an alien spaceship, a laser gun strike on the Earth and the experiments of the American physicist Tesla.

At one time, every self-respecting science fiction writer considered it his direct responsibility to propose his own hypothesis of the origin of the “Tunguska phenomenon,” or even more than one. Alexander Kazantsev was the first to connect the explosion with the unsuccessful landing of the spacecraft. Semyon Slepynin, Stanislav Lem, Kir Bulychev, Genrikh Altov with Valentina Zhuravleva and many others exploited the same theme, and the Strugatsky brothers in the story “Monday Begins on Saturday” went further, actually offering a parody of Kazantsev’s “Explosion”.

In their “counterwinding” interpretation, on the alien ship time went backwards, and even discretely, that is, after midnight our previous day began. Therefore, the aliens who collided with the Earth did not understand anything, found no traces of the disaster, and went home. With the light hand of the Strugatskys, other experimental time machines also began to explode in the Podkamennaya Tunguska region, for example in the works of science fiction writer Kir Bulychev (“The Girl to Whom Nothing Will Happen”) and the film “Draft” based on the work of the same name by Sergei Lukyanenko.

At some point, the Ural Pathfinder magazine refused to even accept stories mentioning the “Tunguska Phenomenon,” but this, of course, did not help, and such stories continue to multiply, as do irresponsible “bold scientific” theories.

Share with friends or save for yourself:

Loading...

We recommend articles on the topic

Who ruled Russia most successfully

Authenticity meaning of the word What does the word authentic mean

Lermontov Mikhail - I will not humiliate myself before you I will begin to deceive godlessly so as not to love