Astronomy

Today, June 30 2008, marks the 100th anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska event. In the early morning of 30 June, 1908, witnesses told of a gigantic explosion and blinding flash. Thousands of square kilometres of trees were burned and flattened. Fortunately, the gigantic blast is happened on unpopulated area in Tunguska, Siberia (now part of Russian Republic).

Scientists have always suspected that an incoming comet or asteroid lay behind the event, but no impact crater was ever discovered and no expedition to the area has ever found any large fragments of an extraterrestrial object. Hundreds of scientific papers, lots of books, essays and stories have been written about the event. The Tunguska Event has been featured in documentary and feature films. It has become popular for the writers and journalists to mention it in their works.

There is several theories try to explain this devastating event, strarts from meteoroid airbrush, large asteroid explosion on high atmosphere, to strange things like small black hole passing to earth, or even UFO crash! The real cause is remaining a mystery until now.

Picture on top shows trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast, photograph from Kulik’s 1927 expedition. Bottom picture showing us the scars on the landscape that can still be seen today (picture source: Wikipedia & BBC)

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