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No Black Hole Or Magnetic Monopole: Tunguska Really Was a Meteor
davide-nature writes "The mysterious blast that flattened 2,000 square km of a remote Siberian forest in 1908 has been blamed on the most bizarre causes, such as an exotic elementary particle left over from the Big Bang, a black hole or, of course, aliens, including in the double-episode 'Tunguska' of The X-Files. But a new analysis of tiny rock samples suggests that a more mundane explanation — a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — may be the right one. The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons, 10 times the energy of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year."
This was weapons test. Space Plane's top secret mission was to fly to the nearby asteroid and slice a chunk of it off. Then bring it over on a gravity tether and launch it into Russian air space. The mass and launch velocity was carefully calculated to cause only injury.
Now I can go back to being terrified about terrorists. The black hole thing really had me pissing myself.
Wasn't aware there was any controversy about this. I always thought it was believed to be a meteor or comet. Of course, I underestimated the power of human imagination. I shouldn't be surprised that some people out there thought it was OMG ALIENS or maybe a strange dark matter bomb placed by the Romulans. After all, if there's a needlessly complicated, idiotic rationale for how the Pyramids have straight walls, there must be one for a giant explosion in Siberia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsnQWtsUFM
Silence is a state of mime.
It's amazing that so many people preferred/prefer to believe that black holes or UFO's were the cause of the Tunguska event. Why is it so hard, for some people, to believe the most probable cause, a meteor, was the cause? Just looking at the moon shows that meteor impacts are not uncommon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irVof7adq4s
It was Nikola Tesla's deathray experiment gone wrong, or right depending on how you look at it.
Only in recent years has it become clear how much loose rock is floating around this solar system. Big hits are rare, but near misses of objects in the multi-ton range are not.
So where is the dash cam video to prove it?
ofcourse:)
"The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons."
I'm assuming they mean megatonnes of TNT, a common unit of explosive energy for things like this.
Unfortunately, megatons as used in the summery is a unit of weight. If that was the wight of the meteor, things would have been very different.
Thankfully, its only the summery thats crap here, TFA says "an estimated 3 to 5 megatonnes of TNT equivalent". So, it says what the actual unit is "megatonnes of TNT equivalent" not "megatons". Different type on ton/tonne (~10% error from that), as well as missing half the definition of the unit.
That's 2 down.
*facepalm* "Megaton" and "megatonne" are the same thing they are just variant spellings. They both mean 1 million ton(nes). The term is also used to refer to 1 million ton(ne)s of TNT as in the measure of TNT equivalence, but the distinction you claim does not exist.
It was an interdimensional cross rip
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxjp6mEPzf1qjhons.jpg
Silence is a state of mime.
It is not a well known, but the fact was magnetic monopoles were quite common before 1890s. Most people would just buy one pole, two was considered a needless luxury or waste. But the Big Magnet did not like it and wanted to double their sales. Their magnets with both the north and the south pole languished on the shelves, unable to, ahem, attract customers. So the lobbied congress, and as usual they added a completely irrelevant rider to Sherman anti-trust legislation and banned monopoles as well as cartels, trusts and collusion. Pretty soon they stopped making them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...but are you sure that the Aliens who launched the meteor at us didn't calculate its power in base 2? Perhaps it was between 3 and 5 Mibiton(ne)s...
Meteoroid!
We've known for a long time that we're not in Known Space. In our universe, Mercury's day isn't the same length as its year as it is in Known Space.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_ton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton
Interesting read. I did not know that a ton (in the US) does not weigh the same as a tonne or a ton (in UK), though they are all measures of weight. Both can also be used for measure of energy through equivalence with a mass of TNT.
Fascinating language English is.
No, you are mistaken. A bomb is 5 megatons. But it weighs much less than that. Just like cooling can be given as "tons" or "tonnes" interchangeably, without regard to the weight of the cooling system or objects being cooled (referring to a BTU conversion of ice cooling). A short hand, sufficiently shortened, becomes detached entirely from the initial meaning. "of TNT" is implied and not required for unambiguous meaning.
Learn to love Alaska
Anyone here ever hear about the Dyatlov Pass Incident in Russia?
Now that is a truly interesting, bizarre, and difficult to understand/explain happening...
are claiming this is evidence of LENR (aka cold fusion). Jebus!
Tonnes are a measure of mass, not weight. Tons appear to be interchangeable (on the surface of Earth).
Unfortunately, megatons as used in the summery is a unit of weight.
Actually, no, as used in the summary, it's a unit measuring explosive force. The author assumes the reader is a competent speaker of the English language, where many words have multiple meanings that are distinguished from one another by the context in which they are used. Alas, on the internets, you find a great many people do not speak or understand English competently... including many for whom it's their native language. Go figure...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Godwin! I saw it first! What did I win?
Old encyclopedias circa 1960 listed Tunguska as a possibly caused by anti-matter.
Which would have been more interesting than the ho-hum "just a meteor" explanation.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsnQWtsUFM
Great documentary and sound theory but the music did not inspire me.
So I made a version of my own.
Here is my version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHA9BkCAvMM
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
In other news, the explosion was said not to be caused by a teapot bearing the label "made on earth".
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Skeptoid covered this: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108
He usually does a good job at covering the evidence and aht it means for the different theories.
The difference is that you pronounce megatonne with a British accent, otherwise no one can understand you.
Other things that probably didn't cause the Tunguska event: demons, kangaroos, cell phone radiation, the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie.
Well duh.... Since when has Occam's Razor been dead? Why do crackpot theories even get mentioned when the simplest explanation (meteor) is ignored?
Tons are not interchangeable, such as the 2000-pound variant, the 2240-pound variant, and the assorted volumes used in measuring ship size (not to be confused with tons displacement, also used in measuring ship size, which can be the megagram one or the 22400-pound one). I'm not even considering the megagram here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I believe that most asteroids are just a huge dust ball held together by gravity, no big rocks, just lots and lots of small particles gathering around a small core. With that view of an asteroid, an explosion in the atmosphere would be expected, and almost no solids would reach the ground.
I didn't ask for him to pronounce me his enemy. Now I'm a troll?
Where did you guys go to moderator school?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens