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Tunguska Mystery Blast Solved?
mfarah writes: "This BBC article informs that an Italian scientist team has determined that the 1908 blast in Tunguska was in fact caused by a low density asteroid - that's why no crater was ever found. The article mentions that had the asteroid fallen into a populated area, instead of remote Siberia, hundreds of thousands of casualties would have been the result. Fortunately this news comes well after the "meteorite blast" fad has faded from Hollywood..."
However, the credibility of that claim was a bit low since it was von Däniken who said it
it's in my head
I remember when I first read about the Tunguska blast several years ago. Many stories told us that some eye witnesses had seen the object make strange turns, for example flying in an S-shaped path. Are these stories completely wrong, or can a low density asteroid behave like that in the athmosphere?
Will work for bandwidth
Still my favorite. And yes, the military is (still) pursuing this option... :-)
I'd always thought that a small comet nucleus met the case. Being mostly ice, it would have a lot of chemicals (methane, ammonia) that are volatile in the earth's atmosphere. The jets of escaping gas would act like rocket exhaust and cause the odd motions that were reported by eye-witnesses. And the explosion from the volatiles would be impressive. Plus, since there was no impact crater, and no piece of the object was found, the ice would make sense. It does tend to melt, you know.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Erm, though the air one is kinda on the right track, its not what is seen to be what causes the explosion. Most of the hypothesis I've seen describe a meteorite that is say, a hard, rocky outer shell surrounding a frozen core of water, or ammonia or some other easily frozen gas/fluid. Drop it into the atmosphere, and as it falls it heats up, slowly building up the interior pressure. Sooner or later that pressure gets high enough so that it 'explodes' when the outer shell finally fails. Do some Google searches on 'airburst' meteorites and you should find some more information. (If you want a demo, you could try nuking a cough drop with a liquid center for like 5-10 minutes, or a hot dog).
Prevailing opinion suggests that the Tunguska event was caused by a comet striking the Earth's atmosphere at a low angle. I saw no evidence in the article to suggest otherwise. It is not clear that very small asteroids can be "rubble piles" like Mathilde. There is virtually no gravitational field to provide cohesion.
You need to work on your random number theory. For true randomness each happening is totally independent of the others. Because one meteor hit recently does not influence when the next will hit. It could be tomorrow or 10,000 years from now. The only difference is a few mathamtitions will have to recalc the "average" impact time.
Dyslexics Untie!
For more details and an alternative explanation, see the following.
Dr. Kundt is at the University of Bonn. I don't know enough to comment on his paper in detail. It seems, though, that the Italian researchers, whose work is reported by the BBC, have not considered things as well as they should have.Well, you're only sort of wrong. Its true that this is the explosion that has been blamed on Tesla in the past occasionally, but its pretty blimming unlikely that he really did cause it. The facts match the metereorite explanation much better, but that doesn't help the 'Tesla found powers man was not meant to know' story.
Mind you, when the Tesla-as-Frankenstein myth gives us stories like 'The Prestige' then I'll not be complaining too much; its a truly brilliant novel.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I've seen a show on the Discover Channel dedicated to this about 5 years ago.
Whoever was researching it at the time talked to natives in the area of the blast, especially to this elderly woman that was alive when the blast occured. He got her description of the blast and found it to be concurrent to a meteorite blast in ultra-low orbit.
What makes this so mysterious is that all the trees in a cardiod (polar graph) were flattened, but in the center, the trees were standing up.
The researcher did an experiment and recreated the conditions on a miniature scale model. He had a big table with pins with white flags on them to represent the trees. He proved that it was a blast (assuming from an asteroid) from the air. He also figured out at what height and angle from the ground the specific asteroid was coming from at the point of it's explosion.
Im sorry to bring this up, im almost embarrassed to ask.
;) and as party conversation happens, we talked about allot of interesting things.
I was at a party this past weekend, we ate and drank very well.. sushi and absinthe
Somehow, in all of this up comes the Tunguska blast. Now, one of the other guests was from Croatia and was a fan of Tesla. The conversation began discussing the most important invention in modern history (he argued AC(betraying his Tesla bias...)) but I argued the industrial revolution began without it, and that AC wasnt the end-all-be-all he suggested... ANYWAY: In this conversation up comes Tunguska. He asserts, with the corroboration of other guests, that the blast was a display of a some top-secret AC weapon that was Tesla's brainchild.
Now, they didnt guarantee that it was absolute truth, but they all had received this meme and could neither confirm nor deny its truth - just that it had been suggested.
Can ANYONE provide some information on this theory? I recognize fanatical theories are often just those - this might be as big a flight of fancy as the Freemasons or alien-butt probes, the latter being more fancy to some i 'spose, but does anyone have information on this gem of a meme?
Actually, I am perfectly aware of the gambler's fallacy, but am also aware of the dynamics better than that. Because a Tunguska snowball is almost certainly a discharge from a meta-stable Oort Cloud, the kinetic energy lost must be restored to allow another discharge. This means that if you have one discharge every 1000 years and you had one 100 years ago, the chances of a discharge are less than 1/1000. Astronomical events are not random as your refutation would require.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I remembering reading someplace that many at the time attributed this to an experiment N.Tesla was running in the US; Trying to transmit usable electric current through the air. It was a theory of some that this experiment caused the damage on the other side of the planet. This along with utility companies realizing the downfall that would result if electricity was free to anyone who wanted to grab it out of air killed Tesla's final masterpiece of a project.
or something like that
A mini-black hole would do interesting things to the atmosphere but would not mass enough to suck everything for miles around into it. The shock wave would beat out its gravity. Its event horizon could be anywhere from a few millimeters to a few meters across.
Of course, I don't really know enough about it. Can someone explain to me exactly what would make a mini black hole create a shock wave?
Dyolf Knip
I'm doing a project on Tesla in my Creative Imaging II class, so if you'll permit a highschool student to do a little educating, I'll try to remember what I read about this incident.
The story, as I remember it, goes like this:
Nikola Tesla, being the eccentric, quixotic type of genius that he was, had created at his Wardenclyffe Laboratory a large tower which he called a Death Ray. His plan was to use these rays (sort of similar in concept to particle beam weapons, I believe) to create an impenetrable defensive perimiter around the country -- around all countries actually -- thus eliminating all war. Tesla was always coming up with things like this...he also came up with a (possible viable) plan for the free transmission of energy throughout the world, but that's a different story.
So anyway, he had this death ray. It had never been tested, but of course it would have to be. He gets word of an upcoming expedition to the North Pole headed by Robert Peary, and he notified the leader that he was going to signal him on a specific night (June 30, 1908) but refrained from mentioning exactly what sort of a signal it would be. His idea was to fire a death-ray-blast "over the heads" so to speak of the exploration party, hitting the ground somewhere relatively nearby, and creating a blast that they could see.
So, the exploration goes out, and he does his thing. On the night of the test, he fires off the death ray. It hums...it crackles...after about twenty minutes or so, an owl flies across the almost-invisible path of the beam, and instantly disintegrates. A few minutes later, Tesla shuts it off.
Tesla eventually recieved word that Peary's party had seen nothing. He was disappointed.
A few weeks later, news comes to the U.S. of a massive explosion in central Siberia (The Tunguska blast) and is instantly convinced that this was caused by his death ray, just slightly off target. He was mortified by the destruction it wrought, and promptly scrapped his plans for the implementation of his design.
That's what I remember...I think it's fairly close to the original story, which I'm sure can be found on the web somewhere...actually, I can take care of that... this should do it. Of course, this story is not to be taken as gospel, as it's well known that a: Nikola Tesla was slightly crazy (though incredibly brilliant) and b: unconfirmed web sources from web pages that specialize in the paranormal, conspiracies, and similar things are suspect at best. However, I think it makes for at least an interesting story.
Oh, and by the way, if you haven't looked up Tesla himself, I highly reccomend that you do so. Incredibly interesting stuff.
Well, that's all,
~Syriloth