It’s the morning on 30 June 1908 . Peace Siberian taiga on the river Tunguska suddenly interrupted by a blinding flash and a terrible roar. Something explodes with the force of a thousand times greater than the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima . People still do not know why . People from neighboring towns told then that they saw in the sky a fiery object that flew from south to north . When he disappeared , a vast series of loud sounds resembling gunshots and there was a cloud of black smoke , which could see “the tongue of fire.”
They were convinced that the end of the world . In about 70 km away from the scene of the incident sediment people fell out of their chairs as a result of a strong shock and burns had to accept from the waves of hot air. The shock was recorded seismic stations around the world. Over the next few nights in Europe sky was illuminated with a light so bright that in England you could at midnight to read a book without turning on the light, and the farmers working in the field. Clouds have a strange red color. There were disturbances in telegraphic communication . Learning recognized that in some distant corner of the earth had to be a powerful volcanic eruption , and the glow is the result of sunlight reflecting off of dust ejected during the eruption. Such a request reappears as a result of comparison with the explosion of the volcano Krakatoa in the Indian Ocean in 1883. After the explosion, the strongest , which reported a man was observed similar phenomena . In turn, local newspapers , which are the only reported the incident, claimed that the Tunguska meteorite fell . Several journalists let go your imagination and have described as the Trans-Siberian train passengers found that a meteorite – in fact, such a fact never took place .
Then the whole thing was forgotten for 20 years. At the beginning of the 20s newly formed Soviet authorities violently needed raw materials – iron, gold , the so-called rare metals , including iridium . Geologists have come to the conclusion that all of these minerals can be found in meteorites . So have sent specialists in search of meteorite craters . One of the researchers was Leonid Kulik . During the expedition to Siberia fell into the hands of his old newspaper with that description of the alleged meteorite find . Kulik walked this path . He collected eyewitness accounts and on this basis developed a report that prompted the Academy of Sciences of the USSR to fund the next expedition. First made ​​in 1927. During the expedition reached the Tunguska . There he saw a shocking sight – trees within a radius of 40 kilometers around the blast site were torn in the roots , forming a shape similar to the wings of a butterfly. In the center was a “forest of telegraph poles ,” as he called him researcher , or bare trunks of trees, completely stripped of branches.
Kulik found traces of fire, but there was no crater . Meteorite like vanished into thin air . The scholar did not find it also in the course of the four subsequent expeditions . The fifth did not happen because of the outbreak of World War II. In its course Kulik died in German captivity . After the war, many researchers undertook further exploration , but found nothing that would finally answer the question of what really happened there . Since Kulik in 1928, announced the results of their expedition , this question is bothering hundreds of scientists and amateurs. Arise, and arise all the time , various theories : serious and fantastic.
The first of these was the theory of a meteorite . With space flows into the Earth’s atmosphere much debris – meteoroids . Most of them are burned in the atmosphere, but the most striking the ground – this is called meteorites. The main problem in support of this theory is the lack of … meteorite. Over Tunguska traces of destruction , but there is no trace that something hit the ground. Kulikowi during the first expedition seemed even to have found meteorite crater , but it was just a mere depression in the ground. During the research, one of the workers noticed the alleged crater piece of molten glass . At first, researchers thought that he had found trace of impact – the so-called impactit , or stone melted in the glass during the burning meteorite impact . It turned out , however, that there is only a piece of impactit bottle.
Therefore, it was suggested that perhaps a meteorite exploded at a height of 6 to 10 kilometers above the ground , before they collided . Such cases do occur, although such a huge force could provide only an extremely large meteor . Maybe not a meteor , a comet or asteroid – the researchers wondered . The nucleus of a comet consists of frozen water and gases , so when a possible outbreak at atmospheric pressure comet disintegrated completely , leaving nothing that could hit the ground. In addition, the gases from the tail may cause unusual phenomena of light , described the outbreak in Europe. Most astronomers , however, rejects this theory for the same reason that the meteorite theory – the enormous explosive force . To make it , the comet would have to be gigantic proportions , and then surely someone would have noticed it before .
In contrast to the meteoroids that fly freely in space , asteroids have orbits defined – they are very small planet orbiting the Sun . In total there are in the solar system , even a few million . Sometimes collide with each other , then the asteroid falls from its orbit and can fly at Earth . According to the Czech astronomer , Professor Zdenek Sekanina , but with them in 1908 aimed towards Siberia, but broke up in the atmosphere, and then exploded. In 2001, a group of Italian astronomers tried on the basis of eyewitness accounts to calculate , from the mysterious object flew over Siberia.
With 886 possible orbits as many as 83 % were the orbits of asteroids . In this case remains unresolved , however, once again the problem of lack tangible remnants of cosmic object. Another proposed explanation of the riddle was ball lightning . In fact, it is indeed a mystery translation by a second . Ball lightning is a luminous globe suddenly appearing in different places. Sometimes it disappears silently , sometimes it ends its existence explosion. Nobody knows exactly what he really is and why it behaves in this way. This phenomenon is so poorly researched that some scholars even dispute its existence.
And since so little is known about him that you can not actually prove that the Tunguska object could not be one of them . In August 1945 the U.S. atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon after, several scholars pointed out the similarity of the descriptions of the atomic bomb and its effects on the incident from his Tunguska .
One of them was a Soviet engineer and science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev . A year after Hiroshima, he published a story ” Explosion ” ( developed them later in the scientific work ) . According to him, over Siberia exploded a nuclear reactor , which is powered arriving from another planet spaceship. His idea has gained a lot of popularity in the USSR. Perhaps it was a bit of desire to show opposition to the authorities, because the official propaganda called belief in UFOs ” succumbing to imperialist propaganda ” . Other supporters of the theory of a spaceship referred to the track Tunguska object, which according to some accounts, he had several times changed , and also found on the site of explosion in the 50s radioactivity .
The problem is that most of the witnesses spoke of the object flying in a straight line , and the radiation is so small that you can explain , for example, radioactive fallout after nuclear test explosions .
