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When Comets Attack
Red Flayer writes "Popular Mechanics is running a story that describes one of the more interesting explanations for the Tunguska explosion of 1908: 'Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object — now more than 100 million miles away — that will pass close to Earth again in 2045.' Note that Popular Mechanics' definition of 'close to' is somewhat different than most people's — the comet will be 3.8 million miles away at its closest. At any rate, the key to this theory is that hydrogen and oxygen in the ice shard exploded upon entering the atmosphere, resulting in the difficult-to-explain blast pattern (previous theories contend that the object must have 'skipped' on the atmosphere and then re-entered at the exact same spot). This would also, sadly, dash the theory that Nikola Tesla was responsible."
The sun's trying to start a snowball fight.
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It was the great Nikola Tesla who summoned the comet in the first place!
The enemies of Democracy are
This artist's rendition of the explosion graced the back cover of this month's The Planetary Report (from The Planetary Society). It illustrates how the bolide likely blew up above the ground and hence produced no crater. The artist is Don Davis.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Maybe you did. Were you in Siberia in 1908?
What if Siberia were a great metropolis before this? Don't believe the lies!
Had it hit a heavily populated area we would have a lot more data than a bunch of trees in the middle of nowhere and the reports from peasants. It was over a decade before a scientist went out there- Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik in 1921 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event. I would say there is a strong chance we would know what the thing actually was, which would allow for a calmer reaction than uneducated peasants fearing the apocalypse.
Now, if it hit a major city during the cold war, it may have triggered a nuclear holocaust...
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It was shown back in 1966 that the butterfly shape of the fallen trees may be caused by the several explosions combined with the ballistic wave.
The Russian researchers built a model of the site (1:10000), with explosion modeled by an explosive cord with an explosive charge at the end. The forest model was built from the tiny flexible wires with plastic crowns.
They have shown that placing the cord at some inclination angle (close to 30 degrees) the impact shape was clearly resembling the butterfly shape of Tunguska event.
The abstract (in Russian) is here:
http://tunguska.tsc.ru/ru/science/conf/1966/zotkin/