Mystery of Tunguska Explosion Remains After A Century

23.07.2008 18:07 UFO - Source: UFO Digest

Mystery of Tunguska Explosion Remains After A Century
from English.Pravda.Ru

Posted: 12:33 July 8, 2008

Tunguska explosion still unsolved 100 years laterThe mystery, which took place 100 years ago, on June 30, 1908, not far from the Tunguska River in Russia’s Siberia, still remains unraveled. Many compare the power of the Tunguska catastrophe with the nuclear explosion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although there were not so many casualties, since the meteorite or whatever it was fell down in the uninhabited area.

Science has not been able to explain the mysterious Tunguska phenomenon yet. Scientists and pseudo-scientists consider several versions which include antimatter, a miniature black hole and even an alien spaceship.

First researchers appeared on the site of the Tunguska disaster in more than ten years after the event occurred. Regular studies were launched only in the 1920s. Eyewitnesses told researchers that they had seen a huge pillar of fire in the sky and could feel the earthquake. The people living very far from the site of the catastrophe said that they could feel the heat in the air.

In 1930, astrophysicist Harlow Shapley found the biggest problem, which deprived scientists of sleep for decades: there was no crater on the site where the space body supposedly hit the Earth. The scientist put forward another version in an attempt to explain the mystery. Shapley believed that the Tunguska meteorite was not a meteorite but a comet or its fragments.

In 1940, Vladimir Royansky from the US-based Union College in Schenectady presumed that the Tunguska meteorite was made of antimatter. In 1941, Lincoln La Paz from the Ohio University in Columbus published two articles on this subject in Popular Astronomy magazine and substantiated the hypothesis. Afterwards, he sent a letter to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR suggesting to search for anomalous isotopes on the site of the impact to prove the presence of antimatter.

The idea was developed further by three prominent US scientists with Nobel Prize winners Willard Libby and Clyde Cowan (a discoverer of the neutrino) among them. Libby, the creator of the renowned radiocarbon dating (a process which revolutionized archeology), concluded that the space body of antimatter had not reached the Earth, but annihilated as a result of entering dense layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, gamma-ray detectors installed on first artificial satellites did not show any incidents of antimatter annihilation in near space.

In 1973, two physicists from the University of Texas presumed that the Tunguska meteorite was a miniature black hole which went through the Earth. Physicist Stephen Hawking believed that miniature black holes appeared after the Big Bang. However, there was no information about the miniature black home coming out of the planet at another end of the globe and thus producing an explosion similar to the Tunguska disaster.