Today, June 30, in the year 1908 was the day something really mysterious happened over the Tunguska region of Siberia. It also flattened a lot of trees in the area.
Folks in the region saw a fireball streaking across the sky, following which there was a huge explosion and half the sky lit up. Then there was a shockwave that knocked them off their feet and broke window panes 400 miles away from the explosion.
The sky didn’t get dark that night in Europe. There were "skyglows" for several nights, and on the first people said it was so bright that you could read newspapers without artificial light.
Nobody knows what caused this–not for sure, anyway. When folks finally got around to investigating the site (20 years later!), they didn’t find any obvious impact crater, suggesting an airburst event fairly high up in the atmosphere.
Leading theories are that it was a meteorite that exploded in the air–or a comet fragment.
More exotic (and less likely) theories include a chunk of antimatter or a small black hole or an alien spaceship.
ALSO TODAY IN HISTORY:
- Albert Einstein published his paper in 1905 that proposed the theory of special relativity, and
- Adolph Hitler in 1934 staged the Night of the Long Knives.
Wow! It’s a Relative Centennial today! 🙂
Plus, Ed Peters got Angela Morelli to marry him. (1984)
Kids playing with uranium?
Happy anniversary, from one Ed to another. (Two Eds are better than one 😉 )
Am I reading this right, or am I just losing any ability of rational thought in anticipation of the long weekend…
(From Jimmy’s “Learn More” link)
“A stony meteoroid of about 10 meters in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to the Little Boy bomb that flattened Hiroshima, and data released by the U.S. Air Force’s Defense Support Program has shown that such explosions occur at a rate of more than once a year.”
Is this really saying that an asteroid explosion proportional to the Hiroshima bomb occurs more than once per year? Is this a misprint?
You neglected the most fascinating possibility: The explosion was the result of the Tesla Death Ray, a device invented by Nicolai Tesla for wirelessly transmitting energy via a a 100 million volt transmitter.
Aparently the explosion occurred at precisely the moment Tesla was aiming his device at the North pole where, he hoped, it’s effects would be seen by the Peary expedition.
It just sounds too got *not* to be true.
Is this really saying that an asteroid explosion proportional to the Hiroshima bomb occurs more than once per year? Is this a misprint?
It’s no miss-print; these explosions occur high up in the atmosphere, above where we can see or hear them. There was just such an explosion over Greenland just a few years ago, captured by satelite photo (I think Jimmy had the picture here, on his blog). Lots of smaller explosions happen with more frequency, and used to have NORAD worried, because they were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a natural and man-made detonation. Improvements in radar technology eventually solved that particular problem.
Tunguska is so cool, even my second hand re-telling of the story wowed my teenage son and his friend. I mean, maybe you have seen a tornado, or been through an earthquake, but Tunguska tops them all.
In the words of Ghostbuster Ray Stantz, “real wrath-of-God stuff…”