Credit: Wikipedia
Time for another Tunguska meteor theory.
– – –
When a meteor zooms toward Earth at 45,000 mph with the strength 10-15 megatons of TNT—185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb—it could possibly take out the entire planet, says Syfy.
If something like that doesn’t scream total annihilation, it’s hard to say what does, except this time it just missed.
Scorched earth and flattened trees were all that was left of the mysterious object after it passed dangerously close to the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908.
Theories have ranged from a black hole colliding with Earth to a clash of matter and antimatter to an alien spaceship crash-landing. An eyewitness even swore the sky was being ripped in two. But why no crater? No debris?
Now Vladimir Pariev and his team of Russian scientists believe that is because an iron meteor just barely missed Earth before its immense momentum and mass blasted it back into space.
“Probably, the most realistic version explaining the Tunguska phenomenon is the through passage of the iron asteroid body as the most resistible to fragmentation across the Earth’s atmosphere,” Pariev said in a study recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Meteors usually shatter into pieces as they hurtle through Earth’s atmosphere. Any space rock smaller than a football field across will shatter a few miles above the surface.
The atmosphere vaporizes the space rock into shards that its intense kinetic energy soon morphs into heat, so anything that remains is just cosmic dust floating around.
For over a century, this was believed to be the reason scientists kept scouring for evidence that eluded them.
Continued here.
– – –
Abstract:
We have studied the conditions of through passage of asteroids with diameters 200, 100, and 50 m, consisting of three types of materials – iron, stone, and water ice, across the Earth’s atmosphere with a minimum trajectory altitude in the range 10–15 km. The conditions of this passage with a subsequent exit into outer space with the preservation of a substantial fraction of the initial mass have been found. The results obtained support our idea explaining one of the long-standing problems of astronomy – the Tunguska phenomenon, which has not received reasonable and comprehensive interpretations to date. We argue that the Tunguska event was caused by an iron asteroid body, which passed through the Earth’s atmosphere and continued to the near-solar orbit.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
May 31, 2020 at 04:06AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 