What caused this mid-air explosion over Russia more than 100 years ago?
On the morning of 30 June 1908, the sky split in two over the forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia and then a mid-air explosion rocked the area.
It had the estimated energy of a 15-megaton bomb – roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and millions of times more energetic than any of the man-made explosives of the day. The source of this big bang could only be extra-terrestrial.
The Tunguska event, as it later became known, was most likely a large asteroid or comet up to 100 metres (328 feet) in diameter that – going on the lack of an impact crater – exploded in mid-air about ten kilometres (6.2 miles) up. The resulting fireball and shockwave charred 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles) and knocked 80 million trees flat in an instant.
The Tunguska object was around five times the size of the Apollo meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Chelyabinsk in February 2013. Objects of this size enter Earth’s atmosphere only once every few centuries and the Tunguska event is one of the largest in recorded history.
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What’s the difference between an asteroid, comet, meteor, meteorite and meteoroid?
A meteoroid is a small fragment of an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun; a meteor is a meteoroid that enters Earth’s atmosphere and burns up (ie a shooting star); and, lastly, a meteorite is a meteoroid that passes through Earth’s atmosphere and survives, impacting the surface. Statistically, the larger the rock the less likely an encounter with Earth is. Objects as big as, say, the Chicxulub asteroid hit our planet only once every 100 million years or so.