Mystery of the biggest explosion in history, is it a message from space?
The terrible Tunguska explosion flattened about 80 million trees on an area of 2,150 square kilometers, but no one knows where it originated.
At about 7:17 a.m. on May 30, 1908, the sparsely populated Krasnoyarsk Krai region awoke to a column of bright blue light like the sun moving across the sky. Then they heard a terrible explosion, tremors moving across the area shattered windows, sending pedestrians tumbling to the ground.
The Tunguska explosion that occurred is considered the most powerful ever recorded in history, with the amount of energy released estimated to be 185 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Even a series of strong tremors were recorded in places far away, such as England.
At the beginning of the 20th century, people's understanding of how meteorites in the Earth's atmosphere was still quite modest. Because of that limitation, as well as the limited amount of scientific data on the Tunguska event due to Soviet secrecy during the Cold War, the event remains a mystery.
Along with that, many hypotheses about the Tunguska event explanation have been put forward, and also have very different reliability.
It remains unclear whether the Tunguska event was caused by a comet or an asteroid. (Picture simulated on computer). Source:SPL
Fallen tree after Tunguska explosion. (Photo taken from Kulik's 1927 survey.)
In the scientific world, the leading cause to explain the event is the aerial explosion of a meteorite when it is about 6-10km from the Earth's surface. This could be a comet meteorite, composed mainly of ice and dust.
Therefore, it completely evaporated after hitting the Earth's atmosphere and left no visible traces. The comet hypothesis was further supported when for many nights after the explosion across Europe there was a bright night sky, apparently caused by dust dispersed in the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, analysis of samples taken from this region shows that they contain a lot of cometary matter.
Many other theories about the explosion, such as occurring due to a "small" black hole passing through the Earth, antimatter, natural H-bomb, methane explosion, electromagnetism, unidentified flying objects. are also proposed, but not rigorously enough to reach a final conclusion.
The Tunguska explosion is like a case where investigators can imagine many scenarios. All scenarios seem to make sense, but there's no way to find the ultimate proof. This makes the Tunguska event even more mysterious.
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