Slashdot Mirror
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 was always under the impression that it was a mini-blackhole that wandered through our planet. that easily explains the lack of crater and the tree patterning. The worst part is, did I read this in a Larry Niven novel or watch it on Discovery channel? Ahh, the joys of waking up and feeling the Mountain Dew bubble it's way through my synapses.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
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
http://www.nearearthobjects.co.uk/
White Paper on Comet/Asteroid Impact Hazard
NEAT - NASA Near Earth Asteroid Tracking
Now if someone would only resurrect old USENET news, so I could dig out the posting I wrote about Tunguska circa 1990.
There's a great article on the myths surrounding Tunguska at http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo/tungus.html. A Russian scientist in the sixties used a model with matchsticks for trees to compute the height and angle of the explosion from the pattern of damage of the trees. From the website:
''Aerodynamics experts in Moscow conducted an experiment about twenty years ago in an effort to simulate Tunguska's blast patterns. The scientists used a charge of explosives suspended over a board covered with miniature "trees" represented by matchsticks. In addition to the single blast point a string of smaller charges were added to reproduce the hypersonic shock wave of the object's ballistic passage through the upper atmosphere.
When the explosives were triggered, a blast pattern strikingly similar to the "butterfly" pattern of the actual Tunguska site was created in the matchstick forest. Although this experiment conclusively demonstrated that the strange pattern was due entirely to a large object that exploded naturally, the experiment's results were still being misinterpreted or misquoted years afterward.''
It didn't disintegrate.. it exploded just above the ground with enough force to flatten the trees for miles around. Even a smaller-sized asteroid can cause a lot of damage when it explodes, as shown in the matchstick forest experiments.
"There was a mysterious explosion of 10-15 megatons (high explosive equivalent at ..." [specific location/time follows] "...The explosion devasted an area of 1,500 miles^2 and the shock was felt as far away as 625 miles. The cause was variously attributed to a meteorite (1927), a comet (1930), a nuclear explosion (1961), antimatter (1965), a small black hole (1973) and an exploding flying saucer (1976). Although the meteorite theory was initiall rejected, a new assessment in 1992 suggest that the explosion can be accounted for by the energy released following a total disintegration at an altitude of 33,000 ft of a 98-ft-diameter common type stony asteroid traveling at hypersonic velocity at an incoming angle of 45 degrees."
Besides the obvious point that there have previously been many theories, but still no prrof (not even with the new theory), I think the more interesting fact is the sociological significance of the various theories. In each case, a theory presented taps into the buzzwords of the day.
While the idea that scientific theories are more media buzzwords than provable facts will hardly come as news to any frequent reader of slashdot, it raises the idea that modern scientists might be well served to learn a bit of history.
"Omnia quia sunt, umbra sunt."
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
But it was another Roswell!
As in, its an event with a perfectly rational but rather interesting explanation that has been distorted by the saucerheads to support their belief structure. There was a cover up at Roswell, but the documents show thats because they were upper-atmosphere experiments to detect USSR nuclear testing; not something they fancied talking about at the time. One dumb army person thought that a UFO crash would make a good cover story, without realising just how good it would be. When they retracted that, people just believed it more.
Anyway, enough ranting from me...
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
"Fortunately this news comes well after the "meteorite blast" fad has faded from Hollywood..."
I'm not sure why that would be fortunate. If nothing else, the Tunguska incident shows that asteroids are a real threat. If Hollywood can help convince Joe/Jane Taxpayer that funneling money into government programs designed to increase the number of dishes we have monitoring the skies, that's a good thing.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
This isn't news, this theory has been around for some time. There have been many papers published on this, recent journal papers include...
I could go on, but a quick search on ADS gives 219 relevant papers.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
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.that it was the saucer section from the Enterprise J, that had crashed after time traveling into the past to kill grampa Berman before he could procreate. Of course nothing was ever found because the Division 6 of the Department of Temporal Correctness sent a clean-up crew. I've known this for years. How come nobody ever listens to me?
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?
If it was a comet that exploded over Tunguska, I think way, way more people would have seen the comet trail heading towards Earth before it exploded.
The light meteor theory makes way more sense, since there was no visible signs from astronomers of such a small meteor heading our way back in 1908. Besides, the speed of the that meteor relative to Earth when it finally hit the Earth's atmosphere was probably around 40,000 mph, and the friction of the atmosphere at that speed is way higher than the temperatures encountered on the heat shield of the Apollo Command Module when it re-entered the atmosphere at 25,000 mph after a Moon mission.
It's no small wonder why the meteor exploded, given the high atmospheric friction of its entry.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Where are all the bodies?
If you can send people thru time to arbitrary places, just dump 'em into the sun. No one will find them.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
And they all say the same thing.
Of course, if it's printed in three different books, it must be true. I don't even need the titles of the books to believe you! Nor do I need to wonder whether all three books are referencing the same flawed source! Nor do I even need to dwell on the logical validity of the claims. Bottom line: BOOKS NEVER LIE.
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 . . . !!!
You know, your title is backwards. If you wrote a book, you would be an author.
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