Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 4 – In 1908, there was
an explosion in Siberia which had the force of 185 times the power of the atomic
bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No meteorite
was ever found, and in the century since, there have been more than 100
hypotheses to explain what has become known as the Tunguska event.
Now a group of Russian scholars led
by Krasnoyarsk physicist Daniil Khrennikov has come up with a new theory, one
that fits all the facts and suggests that the hitherto unexplained event was
caused by an asteroid that passed through the earth’s atmosphere before heading
back into space again.
Their theory is laid out in the latest
issue of a British astronomical journal (Daniil E Khrennikov et al.,On the possibility of through passage of
asteroid bodies across the Earth’s atmosphere,” Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society 493: 1 (March 2020), pp.1344–1351 at academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/493/1/1344/5722124).
Arguing that the body which led to
the explosion at Tunguska “could hardly consist of ice [as many have insisted]
because the length of the trajectory of such a body in the atmosphere before
the complete loss of its mass would be less than the length of its trajectory
estimated on the basis of observational data.”
Therefore, they suggest that the
body was an iron-based asteroid that passed through the earth’s atmosphere,
reaching a low point of 10 to 15 kilometers, and creating an enormous shock
wave before bouncing off again into space. In the process, it would have lost
about 50 percent of its three million tons of weight.
If the Tunguska object was made of iron,
that would explain why there were no iron deposits at the site, the researchers
say. They couldn’t reach the earth’s surface given the speed the asteroid was
travelling and the temperatures surround it as it made it pass. Such a theory
also explains the colors in the sky and the patterns of destruction on the ground.
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