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 the 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. Big Bang combined with the scarcity of space remains - 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 often. 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 the 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.

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; gigantic 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.

Tunguska meteorite in the representation of the artist

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

Explosion near Tunguska

However, the space guest behaved very strangely. It exploded in the air, and several times, did not leave from itself, and the forest did not knock down at all with a blow to the ground. This inflamed the imagination of both science fiction writers and scientists - since then, at least once a year, but it appears a new version what caused the explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Today we will explain what the Tunguska meteorite is from the point of view of astronomy, photos from the impact sites will become our guides.

The most important, the very first and most unreliable information about the meteorite is the description of the fall of the meteorite. 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 that, 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 smoldered. This was an explosion - more precisely, thermal radiation from it. A 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 from the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, came last, and resembled the roar of cannon fire. Immediately after this, there was a second explosion, less powerful; most of the eyewitnesses, dumbfounded by the heat and the shock wave, noticed only its light, which was described as a “second Sun”.

This is where the evidence ends. It is worth taking into account the early hour of the fall of the meteorite and the personalities of eyewitnesses - these were Siberian peasant settlers and natives, Tungus and Evenks. The last in their pantheon of gods have iron birds spitting fire, which gave eyewitness accounts a religious connotation, and ufologists - "reliable evidence" of the presence spaceship at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.

The journalists also tried their best: the newspapers wrote that the meteorite fell right next to the railway, and the passengers of the train saw a space stone, the top of which was sticking out of the ground. Subsequently, it was they, in close conjunction 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 an experiment by Nikola Tesla.

Tunguska myths

The Chelyabinsk meteorite, the younger brother of the Tunguska meteorite in chemical composition and fate, was filmed by hundreds of cameras and cameras during its fall, and scientists quickly found the solid remains of the body - but still there were people who promoted the version of its supernatural origin. And the first expedition to the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite was undertaken 13 years after the fall. During this time, new undergrowth has grown, streams have dried up or turned their course, and eyewitnesses have 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 meteoric iron. However, he did not find either a crater or the remains of a meteorite.

So, where did the meteorite go, and where to look for it? Below we will consider 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 strength of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite, according to the latest calculations of the supercomputers of the US Sandia Nuclear National Laboratory, was “only” 3-5 megatons in TNT equivalent. 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 on the Tunguska meteorite. Previous generations of scientists were let down by a misunderstanding of the meteorite explosion mechanism. The energy did not spread uniformly in all directions, as during the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but was directed to the earth in the direction of the cosmic body.

“The Tunguska meteorite disappeared without a trace”

The crater from the Tunguska meteorite was never found, which gave rise to many speculations on this topic. However, should there be a crater at all? Above, we did not call Tungussky the younger brother for nothing - he also exploded in the air, and his main part, weighing several hundred kilograms, was found at the bottom of the lake only thanks to multiple video recordings. This happened because of its loose, loose composition - it was either a “heap of rubble”, an asteroid made up of pili and separate parts, or part of it. for 13 years separating the date of the fall and the first expedition, this funnel 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 explosion site. It has a regular ellipsoidal shape directed towards the forest felled by a meteorite, a conical shape characteristic of impact craters, its age is equal to the age of the meteorite fall, and magnetic studies show the presence of a dense object at the bottom. The study of the lake is still ongoing, 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 very place of the fall. However, at that time, descriptions of explosions of meteorites in the air were unknown to science - the remains of the Chelyabinsk meteorite flew off quite far from the place of the explosion. 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 space wood." Later there were lovers of sensations who took this story seriously.

“The Tunguska meteorite was created by Tesla”

Many pseudoscientific theories about the Tunguska meteorite originated from jokes or misinterpreted statements. This is how Nikola Tesla got involved in the meteorite story. In 1908, he promised to light the way in Antarctica to Robert Peary, one of two people credited with leading the way to the Polar 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 the path of Robert Peary in Siberia, the maps of which he allegedly requested. At the same time, Tesla himself argued that it is possible to transmit over long distances only with the help of ether waves. However, the absence of ether as a medium for the interaction of electromagnetic waves was proved after the death of the great inventor.

This is not the only fiction about the Tunguska meteorite that is passed off as truth today. There are people who believe in the "alien ship moving back in time" version - only it was first introduced in the Strugatsky brothers' humorous novel Monday Starts on Saturday. And the members of Kulik's expeditions, bitten by the taiga midge, wrote about billions of mosquitoes that huddled into one big ball, and their heat gave rise to a burst of energy with a capacity of megatons. Thank God, this theory did not fall into the hands of the yellow press.

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

At first, they thought so because they did not find either a crater or a meteorite - however, this is due to 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 around the Tunguska meteorite. We will now analyze them.

The most important “proof” of the supernatural nature of the Tunguska meteorite is that in the summer of 1908, supposedly before the fall of a cosmic body, glows and white nights appeared in 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 fall of the meteorite. Here it is, the consequence of blind trust in the headlines.
They also note that in the center of the explosion of the meteorite, trees remained without branches and foliage, like pillars. This, however, is typical of any powerful atmospheric explosions - the 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 even butterfly craters on. These mysteries were only able to be solved 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 were no walls left of 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 than thermal bursts. A strong explosion of a meteorite unambiguously occurred in several dimensions at once, and the fact that trees began to grow rapidly on fertile soil open to the sun is not at all surprising. Thermal radiation itself and injury to trees also affect growth - like scars grow on the site of wounds on the skin. Meteoritic additives could also accelerate the development of plants: a lot of iron and silicate balls, fragments from the 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 develops and penetrates people's lives - and using satellite television, satellite navigation and looking at images of deep space, they no longer believe in the firmament of heaven, and do not take astronauts in white space suits 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 Tunguska meteorite is rightfully considered the greatest scientific mystery of the 20th century. The number of options about its nature has exceeded a hundred, but not one has been recognized as the only true and final one. Despite a significant number of eyewitnesses and numerous expeditions, the crash site was not found, as well as the material evidence of the phenomenon, all the versions put forward are based on indirect facts and consequences.

How the Tunguska meteorite fell

At the end of June 1908, the inhabitants of Europe and Russia witnessed unique atmospheric phenomena: from solar halos to anomalously white nights. On the morning of the 30th, a luminous body, presumably of a spherical or cylindrical shape, swept at high speed over the central strip of Siberia. According to observers, it had a white, yellow or red color, was accompanied by rumbling and sounds of explosions when moving, and left no traces in the atmosphere.

At 7:14 local time, the hypothetical body of the Tunguska meteorite exploded. A powerful blast wave knocked down trees in the taiga on an area of up to 2.2 thousand hectares. The sounds of the explosion were recorded 800 km from the approximate epicenter, seismological consequences (an earthquake with a magnitude of up to 5 units) were recorded throughout the Eurasian continent.

On the same day, scientists noted the beginning of a 5-hour magnetic storm. Atmospheric phenomena, similar to the previous ones, were clearly observed for 2 days and periodically occurred within 1 month.

Collection of information about the phenomenon, evaluation of facts

Publications about the event appeared on the same day, but serious research began in the 1920s. By the time of the first expedition, 12 years had passed since the fall, which had a negative impact on the collection and analysis of information. This and subsequent pre-war Soviet expeditions could not find where the object fell, despite aerial surveys carried out in 1938. The information obtained allowed us to conclude:

There were no photos of the body falling or moving.
The detonation occurred in the air at an altitude of 5 to 15 km, the initial estimate of the yield was 40-50 megatons (some scientists estimate it at 10-15).
The explosion was not a point one; the crankcase was not found in the alleged epicenter.
The proposed landing site is a swampy area of taiga on the Podkamennaya Tunguska River.

Top hypotheses and versions

meteoric origin. The hypothesis supported by most scientists about the fall of a massive celestial body or a swarm of small objects or passing them tangentially. Real confirmation of the hypothesis: no crater or particles were found.
The fall of a comet with a nucleus of ice or cosmic dust with a loose structure. The version explains the absence of traces of the Tunguska meteorite, but contradicts the low height of the explosion.
Cosmic or artificial origin of the object. The weak point of this theory is the absence of traces of radiation, except for rapidly growing trees.
Detonation of antimatter. The Tunguska body is a piece of antimatter that has turned into radiation in the Earth's atmosphere. As in the case of the comet, the version does not explain the low height of the observed object, and there are no traces of annihilation either.
The failed experiment of Nikola Tesla on the transfer of energy at a distance. The new hypothesis, based on the notes and statements of the scientist, has not been confirmed.

The main contradiction is the analysis of the area of the fallen forest, it had the shape of a butterfly characteristic of a meteorite fall, but the orientation of the lying trees is not explained by any scientific hypothesis. In the early years, the taiga was dead, later the plants showed abnormally high growth, characteristic of the areas exposed to radiation: Hiroshima and Chernobyl. But the analysis of the collected minerals found no evidence of the ignition of nuclear matter.

In 2006, in the area of Podkamennaya Tunguska, artifacts of various sizes were discovered - quartz cobblestones from fused plates with an unknown alphabet, presumably deposited by plasma and containing particles inside that can only be of cosmic origin.

The Tunguska meteorite was not always taken seriously. So, in 1960, a comic biological hypothesis was put forward - a detonation thermal explosion of a cloud of Siberian midges with a volume of 5 km 3. Five years later appeared original idea brothers Strugatsky - “You need to look not where, but when” about an alien ship with a reverse flow of time. Like many other fantastic versions, it was logically justified better than those put forward by research scientists, the only objection is anti-science.

The main paradox is that despite the abundance of options (scientific above 100) and the international studies carried out, the secret has not been revealed. All reliable facts about the Tunguska meteorite include only the date of the event and its consequences.

Photo: the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite (performance)

The fall of the Tunguska meteorite

Fall year

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 between the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska rivers has forever remained as crash site The Tunguska meteorite, when it flared up like the sun and flew several hundred kilometers, a fiery object fell on it.

Photo: the alleged place of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite

Thunder rumbles were heard for almost a thousand kilometers around. The flight of the space alien ended with a grandiose explosion over the deserted taiga at an altitude of about 5 - 10 km, followed by a continuous fall of the taiga in the interfluve of Kimchu and Khushmo - tributaries of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, 65 km from the village of Vanavara (Evenkia). Living witnesses of the cosmic catastrophe were the inhabitants of Vanavara and those few Evenk nomads who were in the taiga. The place where the Tunguska meteorite fell can be viewed on Google maps

Size

Tunguska meteorite caused a blast wave, which in a radius of about 40 km was tumbled down the forest, animals were destroyed, people were injured. Its size was 30 meters. Due to the powerful light flash of the Tunguska explosion and the flow of hot gases, a forest fire broke out, which completed the devastation of the area. On the vast expanse bounded from the east by the Yenisei, from the south by the line "Tashkent - Stavropol - Sevastopol - northern Italy - Bordeaux", from the west - by the Atlantic coast of Europe, unprecedented in scale and completely unusual light phenomena unfolded, which went down in history under the name "bright nights of the summer of 1908. Clouds formed at an altitude of about 80 km intensely reflected Sun rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they have not been observed before. On the whole of this gigantic territory, on the evening of June 30, night practically did not fall: the entire sky shone (it was possible to read a newspaper at midnight without artificial lighting). This phenomenon continued for several nights.

Weight

According to the scattering of particles, their concentration and the estimated power of the explosion, scientists in the first approximation estimated the weight of the space alien. It turned out, The Tunguska meteorite weighed about 5 million tons.

Expeditions

In the history of mankind, in terms of the scale of observed phenomena, it is difficult to find a more grandiose and mysterious event, how Tunguska meteorite. The first studies of this phenomenon began only in the 20s of the last century. Four expeditions organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by the mineralogist Leonid Kulik, were sent to the site of the fall of the object. However, even 100 years later, the mystery of the Tunguska phenomenon remains unsolved.

In 1988, members of the research expedition of the Siberian Public Fund " Tunguska space phenomenon"Under the guidance of Corresponding Member of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts (St. Petersburg) Yuri Lavbin, metal rods were discovered near Vanavara. Lavbin 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 spacecraft. It was supposed to split the comet. But, unfortunately, the attack of the most powerful cosmic body was not entirely successful for the ship. True, the comet's nucleus crumbled into several fragments. Some of them hit the Earth, and most of them passed by our planet. 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 on it the blocks were out of order, the remains of which were found by the expedition to the crash site.

Photo: Fragment of the Tunguska meteorite

For many years of searching for the wreckage 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. Recently, however, researchers for the first time thought about the origin of the holes and the picture of the felling of trees in the area of the cataclysm. According to all known theories and practice itself, fallen trunks should lie in parallel rows. And here they lie clearly anti-scientific. This means that the explosion was not classical, but somehow completely unknown to science. 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.

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.

Hypotheses

expressed more than a hundred different hypotheses 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.

ice comet

The latest is 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.

Meteorite

However, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still meteorite exploded above the earth's surface. 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.

Subsequent expeditions noticed that the area of fallen forest has a characteristic butterfly shape, directed from east-southeast to west-northwest. The total area of fallen forest is about 2200 square kilometers. Modeling the shape of this area and computer calculations of all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with earth's surface, and even before that in the air at an altitude of 5 - 10 km.

Tesla

At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century, hypothesis about the connection of Nikola Tesla with the Tunguska meteorite. According to this hypothesis, on the day of the observation of the Tunguska phenomenon (June 30, 1908), Nikola Tesla conducted an experiment on energy transfer "through the air." A few months before the explosion, Tesla claimed that he could light the way to the North Pole for the expedition of the famous traveler Robert Peary. In addition, records have been preserved in the journal of the US Library of Congress that he requested maps of "the least populated parts of Siberia." His experiments to create standing waves, when, as stated, a powerful electrical impulse concentrated tens of thousands of kilometers in the Indian Ocean, fit well into this "hypothesis". If Tesla succeeded in pumping the impulse with the energy of the so-called "ether" (a hypothetical medium, which, according to scientific ideas of past centuries, was credited with the role of a carrier electromagnetic interactions) and the effect of resonance to “shake” the wave, then, according to the myth, a discharge with a power comparable to a nuclear explosion should occur.

Other hypotheses

Writers also gave their versions of the Tunguska phenomenon. famous science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev described the Tunguska phenomenon as a catastrophe of a spacecraft flying to us from Mars. Writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the book "Monday begins on Saturday" put forward a comic hypothesis about counter-winding. In it, the events of 1908 are explained by the reverse course of time, i.e. not by the arrival of the spacecraft to Earth, but by its launch.

date	Author. Hypothesis.	essence of the hypothesis. Problems.
1908	ordinary	The descent of the god Ogda. Flight of the fiery serpent. Repetition of the tragedy of Sodom and Gomorrah Beginning of the 2nd Russo-Japanese War.
1908	I. K. Solonin	Enormous size aerolite
1921	L. A. KulikMeteoritic	According to the results of a survey of eyewitnesses, it was concluded that a meteorite had fallen in the region of Podkamennaya Tunguska.
1927	L. A. Kulik	Iron meteorite Fragments of an iron meteorite fell out associated with comet Pons-Winnicke. Problems: Why did the high-altitude explosion occur? Where are the remains of the meteorite? What caused western white nights?
1927	meteorite transformation	For the first time, they started talking about the version of the transformation of a meteorite into jets of fragments and gas.
1929	Tangential Meteorite	The body fell at a small angle to the horizon, before reaching the Earth, it split and experienced a rebound, rising a hundred kilometers up. The fragments, having lost speed, fell out in a completely different place. She explained the absence of material evidence, white nights, etc., but the calculations did not confirm her.
1930	F. Whipple Comet Explosion	The Earth collided with a small comet (the comet's nucleus is a "ball of dirty snow"), which completely evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving no trace. Problems: How could the comet sneak up on you? The comet could not have penetrated that deep into the atmosphere.
1932	F. de Roy. I. VernadskySpace objects	Earth collided with a compact cloud of cosmic dust.
1934	Comet	Collision with a comet's tail.
1946	A.P. KazantsevAlien	Explosion of atomic engines of an alien ship. Problems: No traces of radiation detected.
1948	L. LapazK. Cowan. LibbyAntimatter meteorite	The Tunguska meteorite is a piece of antimatter that has experienced annihilation in the atmosphere, i.e. completely turned into radiation due to nuclear processes. Problems: Annihilation should have occurred in the upper atmosphere. Annihilation products (neutrons and gamma quanta) were not found. “The whole Universe is material” (A.D. Sakharov)
1951	V. F. Solyanik	Positively charged iron-nickel meteorite The meteorite moved with an inclination angle of 15-20 degrees, at a speed of >10 km/s. An intense mechanical interaction occurs between the Earth's surface and a flying meteorite, reaching several million tons. Approaching 15-20 km to the Earth's surface, the dark matter began to discharge, producing various mechanical damage.
1959	F. Yu. SiegelAlien	The explosion of a meteorite is similar to the destruction of the planet Phaeton, once located between the planets Mars and Jupiter. A UFO exploded at the crash site. As arguments, he cited an increased level of radioactivity at the epicenter of the explosion and the maneuver of the Tunguska body when moving in the atmosphere by almost 90 degrees. Problems: No traces of radiation detected.
1960	G.F. PlekhanovBiological (comic)	A detonation explosion of a cloud of midges with a volume of more than 5 cubic kilometers.
1961	alien	Disintegration of the flying saucer.
1962	Meteoritic-electro-magnetic	On the electrical breakdown of the ionosphere to the Earth caused by a meteor.
1963	A. P. Nevsky Electrostat. meteorite discharge	According to his calculations, a body with a radius of 50-70 meters moved at a speed of 20 km / s, then, having discharged at a height of about 20 km. was almost completely destroyed.
1963	I. S. Astapovich Comet ricochet	Due to the gentle trajectory (the angle of inclination is about 10 degrees) and the minimum flight height of about 10 km, a small comet, having passed through the Earth's atmosphere and causing damage during deceleration, lost its shell, and the nucleus entered the interplanetary space along a hyperbolic trajectory.
1964	G. S. Altshuller V. N. ZhuravlevaAlien	The explosion was caused by a laser signal that came to Earth from the civilization of the planetary system of the 61st star from the constellation Cygnus.
1965	A. N. StrugatskyB. N. StrugatskyAlien	Alien ship with reverse time flow.
1966	Meteoritic	The fall of a superdense piece of white dwarf.
1967	V. A. EpifanovNatural	Due to a local earthquake or geological displacement of the earth's layers, a crack formed in the crust, into which dust, a fine suspension of oil and methane hydrates, mixed with "blue fuel", escaped and ignited by lightning.
1967	D. Bigby Alien	Having discovered ten small moons with strange trajectories, he concluded: in 1908 a UFO flew in, a capsule with a crew separated from it and exploded over the taiga, the ship was in Earth orbit until 1955, the crew was waiting and losing altitude, finally, “machine guns worked”, and there was an explosion.
1968	Natural	Dissociation of water and explosion of explosive gas.
1969	Comet	The fall of a comet from antimatter. Problems: “The whole Universe is material” (A.D. Sakharov)
1969	I. T. ZotkinMeteoritic	The radiant of the Tunguska fireball is similar to the radiant of the daytime beta-Taurid meteor shower, associated in turn with the Encke comet
1973	A. JacksonM. Ryan black hole	The Tunguska meteorite was actually a miniature "black hole" of very small mass. In their opinion, it entered the Earth in Central Siberia, passed through, and left in the North Atlantic.
1975	G. I. PetrovV. P. StulovKometnaya	Only the loose nucleus of a comet is able to penetrate so deeply into the Earth's atmosphere. Density should be no more than 0.01 g/cm.
1976	L. KresakKometnaya	The Tunguska object was actually a fragment of Comet Encke - an old and dim comet with the shortest orbit of all comets moving around the Sun - that broke away from it several thousand years ago.
80s	L. A. MukharevNatural	A giant ball lightning exploded, which arose in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of powerful energy pumping by ordinary lightning, or sharp fluctuations in the atmospheric electric field.
80s	B. R. HermanNatural	Lightning spawned space dust invading the earth's atmosphere at cosmic speed. By its nature, the Tunguska ball lightning belonged to cluster-type lightning.
80s	V. N. SalnikovNatural	The explosion is associated with the release of a powerful electromagnetic "vortex" (an underground thunderstorm) from the depths of the earth. The natural analogue of this phenomenon is ball lightning.
80s	A. N. Dmitriev V. K. Zhuravlev	The Tunguska meteorite is a plasmacide erupted from the Sun.
1981	N. S. KudryavtsevaNatural	Emission of gas-mud mass from a volcanic pipe located near Vanavara.
1984	E. K. Iordanishvili Meteoritic	The celestial body flying at a small angle to the surface of our planet became hot at an altitude of 120-130 km, and its long tail was observed by hundreds of people from Baikal to Van Avara. Having touched the Earth, the meteorite "ricocheted", jumped several hundred kilometers up, and this made it possible to observe it from the middle reaches of the Angara. Then the Tunguska meteorite, having described a parabola and having lost its cosmic velocity, really fell to the Earth, now forever.
1984	D. V. Timofeev Natural	Explosion of 0.25-2.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The plume of gas, escaping from the bowels of the Earth in the area of the Southern swamp on June 30, 1908, formed an explosive mixture. It was set on fire by lightning or a fireball.
1986	M.N. Tsynbal	A meteorite consisting of metallic hydrogen A block of metallic hydrogen weighing 400,000 tons, instantly dispersed, combined with oxygen created an explosive mixture of large volume.
1988	A.P. KazantsevAlien	The Tunguska meteorite is a lander that separated from the Black Prince starship, a mysterious satellite discovered in Earth orbit by Californian astronomer John Bagby in 1967.
Beginning 90s	M.V.TolkachevKometnaya	The Tunguska comet could consist of gas hydrate compounds released instantly under the influence of a sharp change in temperature.
Beginning 90s	V. G. Polyakov Meteoritic	The meteorite consisted of sodium of cosmic origin. Penetrating into the dense layers of the atmosphere containing water vapor, the meteorite entered into chemical reaction. A chemical explosion occurred in the region of critical saturation.
Beginning 90s	A. E. ZlobinKometnaya	The iron core of a long-period comet that flew to us from the Oort cloud had the properties of a superconductor due to its low temperature. This largely determined the conditions for its penetration into the Earth's atmosphere, and the unusual nature of the explosion.
1991	Natural	An unusual earthquake, accompanied by some light phenomena.
1993	K. Chaiba P. Thomas K. ZahnleComet	The body of a cometary nature should collapse at an altitude of 22 km. And a small stone asteroid, about 30 meters in diameter, would collapse at an altitude of about 8 km.
1993	Meteoritic	The fall of an icy meteorite, which, having discharged the electric charge accumulated on its surface, again flew into space.
90s	A.Yu. Olkhovatov Natural	The Tunguska phenomenon was a kind of terrestrial earthquake that arose at the site of a geological fault in the area of the Kulikovsky paleovolcano.
90s	A. F. Ioffe E. M. DrobyshevskyKometnaya	Chemical explosion of an explosive mixture of oxygen and hydrogen released from cometary ice by electrolysis after its repeated passage around the Sun.
90s	V. P. EvplukhinMeteoritic	The meteorite was an iron ball with a radius of 5 meters and a mass of 4100 tons, surrounded by a silicate shell. Due to deceleration in the dense layers of the atmosphere, a current was induced in it, then there was a sharp heating and dispersion of the substance. The subsequent airglow was caused by the release of large amounts of ionized iron.
1995	Meteoritic	On antimatter entering the Earth's atmosphere.
1995	Meteoritic	About a special meteorite with a carbonaceous chondrid.
1995	A. F. Chernyaev	The ethereal-gravitational bolide Meteorite did not fall to the Earth, but rather flew out of its depths, turning out to be an etherograviobolide. "Ether-gravity bolide" is a super-dense stone block, like an underground meteorite, supersaturated with compressed ether.
1996	V. V. Svetsov Meteoritic	A stone asteroid with a diameter of 60 meters, weighing 15 Mt entered the atmosphere at an angle of 45 degrees, penetrated deep into the atmosphere. Not slowing down enough, and in dense layers experienced huge aerodynamic loads, which completely destroyed it, turning it into a swarm of small (no more than 1 cm in diameter) fragments immersed in a high-intensity radiation field.
1996	M. Dimde Energy	An experiment on the transmission of electric wave energy at a distance. A few months before the explosion, Tesla claimed that he could light the way to the north pole of the expedition of the famous traveler R. Pirri. When trying to do this, he made a mistake in the calculations.
1996	alien	About the entry into the Earth's atmosphere of an extraterrestrial substance, possibly a planet with a high content of iridium.
1997	B. N. IgnatovNatural	The Tunguska explosion was caused by "the collision and detonation of 3 fireballs with a diameter of more than one meter each."
1998	B. U. Rodionov	An explosion of hypothetical linear matter contained within each thread of a magnetic flux quantum.
1998	Yu. A. Nikolaev Meteoritic	Ejection 200 kt. natural methane, and then an explosion of a methane-air cloud initiated by a stone or iron meteorite of three meters in diameter.
2000	V. I. Zyukov Kometny	The Tunguska meteorite could be a relic ice comet, which was a block of ice of high modification. The proposed modification of ice makes it possible to solve the issue of the strength of the HCT when it enters the Earth's atmosphere, and is in good agreement with many known observational facts.
July 2003	Yu. D. Labvin Martian-comet-alien	Labvin Yu. D. believes that in order to prevent a large-scale catastrophe, due to the collision of an invading comet (of Martian origin) with the Earth, it was destroyed by an alien ship that started from the Earth and died during the destruction of the comet. In 2004, on the banks of the Podkamennaya Tunguska, a scientist discovered materials belonging to a technical device of extraterrestrial origin. According to preliminary analyzes, the metal is an alloy of iron and silicon (iron silicide) with the addition of other elements, unknown in this composition on Earth and having a very high melting point.

But these are all just hypotheses, and the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite remains a mystery.

Thousands of researchers are striving to understand what happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga. In addition to Russian expeditions, international expeditions regularly go to the area of the Tunguska disaster.

Consequences

Tunguska meteorite for many years he turned the taiga rich in vegetation into a dead forest cemetery. Studying consequences of the disaster showed that the energy of the explosion was 10 - 40 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand simultaneously exploded nuclear bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Later, increased tree growth was found in the center of the explosion, indicating a radiation release. And this is not all the consequences of the Tunguska meteorite ...