Tunguska riddle solved
Just a smidgen over 100 years ago there was a really big bang in Tunguska, central Siberia.
The blast is thought to have been 1,000 times more powerful as the bomb dropped over Hiroshima.
It flattened more than 80 million trees over an area of 2,000 square kilometers, produced a shockwave that knocked people off their feet 60km away and would have killed a lot of people if it hadn't happened in a sparsely populated Russian forest.
A strange result from the blast meant it was light enough to play cricket and read newspapers in London... at midnight. That's a bit strange, we'll get back to that in a few paragraphs.
What could have caused this explosion at Tunguska?
Well there's been plenty of theories over the years, from the scientific (an asteroid) to the weird scientific (antimatter or a black hole) to the strange (a Nikola Tesla experiment gone wrong) to the crackpot (a UFO crash).
But according to a report from Universe Today, a researcher from Cornell University has come up with the definite answer... it was Tesla... just joking, sorry... it was a comet.
Researcher Michael Kelly says he's come to this conclusion by studying the space shuttle's exhaust plume and a type of cloud that is visible at night. Called noctilucent clouds, they are made of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.
Likening the event to a century-old murder mystery, Kelly and his team say the massive amount of water vapor spewed into the atmosphere by the 1908 comet's icy nucleus created the clouds which freaked out the Londoners.
Noctilucent clouds are the Earth's highest clouds, forming naturally at about 55 miles over the polar regions during the summer months.
The space shuttle exhaust plume, the researchers say, resembled the comet's action. A single space shuttle flight injects 300 metric tonnes of water vapor into the Earth's upper atmosphere, causing noctilucent clouds a few days later in the Arctic.
Looking at the evidence then, there's only one explanation. What could have caused such an explosion and thrown up all that water? A comet. Or an alien water tanker with a dodgy handbrake.
You take your pick.
Weird Science Factoid: No two cornflakes are identical. It's true, I checked this morning at breakfast.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
