Physicists have a new theory of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite

A celestial body could explode in the air without reaching the surface of the planet

About 7:14 am on June 30, 1908, over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in the territory of the present Krasnoyarsk Territory, a gigantic explosion occurred from a fallen meteorite Scientists now claim that a body of cosmic origin was attracted to Earth due to the planet passing through a black hole.

Photo: freepik.com

The explosion from the fall of the Tunguska meteorite leveled 2,150 square kilometers of taiga, its power was estimated at 10-20 megatons, which was perhaps thousands of times greater than the power of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Eyewitnesses described shock waves coming from hundreds of kilometers away and heard several explosions similar to cannon shots.

Others said they saw a “pipe” in the sky; reports described it as blue. What was puzzling about this event was the absence of an impact crater, which has still not been found. Over the years, many explanations have been offered for this event — from asteroids zipping through the atmosphere to, in short, primordial black holes passing straight through the Earth.

In the current era of the universe, black holes form when giant stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. This puts a limit on how small stellar black holes can be in the current universe: they must form from a large amount of mass condensed into one small region, and they only occur in stars with a mass about 20 times that of the Sun. Primordial black holes, on the other hand, are hypothetical structures that are thought to have formed in the first few seconds of the universe's existence, when all the matter that would later form stars and galaxies was more tightly packed together.

“At that point, clumps of hot material could be dense enough to form black holes, potentially having a mass ranging from 100,000 times less than a paper clip to 100,000 times more massive than the Sun,” explains NASA. — Then, as the Universe rapidly expanded and cooled, the conditions for the formation of black holes thus disappeared.»

If such black holes actually formed, astronomers say they still exist. It has even been suggested that primordial black holes smaller than an atom could pass through the Earth every day without causing harm to the planet, with one large hole appearing every thousand years or so.

Looking at the Tunguska event, one group of physicists suggested that it could have been caused by the passage of a primordial black hole through the planet. The team argued that a black hole with the mass of a large asteroid could explain the absence of the impactor not seen at Tunguska, as well as the blue light seen by witnesses.

«Most of the radiation from the shock front will come from vacuum ultraviolet and will be absorbed and re-emitted at longer wavelengths, — scientists explained. — There will be little hard X-ray radiation, and the accompanying plasma column will appear dark blue.

Although this was a very original proposal, the team suggested a way in which this idea could be tested, — look for signs of an exit hole on the other side of the planet.

«The black hole would enter the Earth, and the strength of the rocks would not allow the creation of an underground shock wave, — explains the team of physicists. — Because of its high speed and because it loses only a small fraction of its energy as it passes through Earth, the black hole should travel in a nearly straight line through the planet, entering at an angle of 30 degrees to the horizon and exiting through the North Atlantic. in the area of ​​40-50 degrees north latitude and 30-40 degrees west longitude. This solution provides a test of the entire hypothesis.»

The team proposed looking for shock waves on the opposite side of the globe.

Other scientists indicate that the Tunguska event can be explained without resorting to the black hole version , formed since time immemorial, which have the mass of a large asteroid, and a body of cosmic origin that exploded in the air at an altitude of 10-14 kilometers above the earth.