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."

Comments

Well I'm Glad That's Solved

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can go back to being terrified about terrorists. The black hole thing really had me pissing myself.

Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[saturnianjourneyman]

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.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[g0bshiTe]

I agree because clearly the ancient egyptians couldn't possibly have though to tie two sticks together at a 90 degree angle and dangle a string weighted to make a plum line. I mean really.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Mashiki]

How would they know the sticks were at a 90 degree angle?

How did the Romans figure out how to build the aqueducts, and great feats of engineering? Mathematics+trial and error. The belief that only 'advanced people' could build things like that is an unbelievable amount of hubris. Being realistic, we really don't know how many dark ages we've passed through, except those that really stand out.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[JesseMcDonald]

How would they know the sticks were at a 90 degree angle? Aliens remain the simplest explanation without resorting to geometric constructions(which are hard)...

A right angle is one of the simplest geometric constructions there is. You can construct the perpendicular to a line at any point with three applications of a compass (which can be as simple as a marking device on the end of a string) and one use of a straightedge.

http://www.mathopenref.com/constperplinepoint.html

There is also the 3-4-5 right triangle, which only requires the ability to produce edges which are integer multiples of a reference length.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[newcastlejon]

All you need to make a 90 degree angle is something that you can fold. Take a piece of paper (or papyrus) and fold it, then fold it again so that the two straight edges are together and bingo, you have a right angle.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Lunix Nutcase]

You and the posters above you need to fix your sarcasm detectors. They were joking...

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The serious answer to the joking rhetorical question is that tile layers who like to play geometric patterns stumbled upon the properties of the 3-4-5 triangle. That 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5 is completely obvious when the tile pattern is laying down right in front of you. It is trivial to demonstrate a triangle is right (or at least that is so extremely close to be a right triangle that no one cares about its variance) by physical inspection, applying a folding/flipping operation. The nature of such triangle became common enough knowledge, even if the proof did not come into existence for a long time later. The hard part is figuring out what to try and prove.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Capt.Albatross]

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 think there was a tiny window of doubt because no large remnant could be found, but 'icy comet fragment' and 'explosion at altitude' were always plausible explanations for that, even before the Chelyabinsk meteor convincingly demonstrated the latter.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Dishevel]

If you want real power you need to pipe dev/zero and dev/random simultaneously to dev/null. Only then can you create more power than you use.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[snakeplissken]

How would they know the sticks were at a 90 degree angle? Aliens remain the simplest explanation without resorting to geometric constructions(which are hard)

but how would the aliens know how to make a 90 degree angle? OMG! even the aliens have aliens, it's worse than i thought!

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[The Grassy Knoll]

Well, according to 2000AD Prog 81 (yes, I'm old), some researchers were sent back in time to find out what happened. They appeared over Tunguska moments before the explosion, were converted to anti-matter and Bob's your uncle. Florix Grabundae .

Best explanation for Tunguska

[wbr1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsnQWtsUFM

It's amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's amazing

[wonkey_monkey]

Because, like most conspiracy theories, believing in them makes you feel cleverer than the sheeple around you.

Too much space junk

[Animats]

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.

Dash cam video

[jfdavis668]

So where is the dash cam video to prove it?

Re:megatons != megatonnes of TNT

[Lunix Nutcase]

*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.

Monopoles were common before 1890s

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

Re:Meteor?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Meteoroids are in space; meteors burn up (or explode?) in the atmosphere, meteorites strike earth.