Latest Tunguska event Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A Russian scientist has reportedly found meteorite or asteroid fragments potentially linked to a mysterious explosion that took place over Siberia more than 100 years ago. The Tunguska Event, as it is called, took place in June 1908. It featured a blast that was one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb and decimated approximately 80 million trees over an 800 square mile area, but resulted in only a single...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Initial reports put last Friday’s (Feb 15) Chebarkul meteorite that exploded over Russia’s Urals region at about 10 tons. But after careful analysis, NASA released new information that puts the meteorite closer to 10,000 tons—1,000 times larger than the estimated size reported by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). “My guess is that someone eyeballed the videos and made an educated guess,” said Margaret...

ESA The first firm details of the 15 February asteroid impact in Russia, the largest in more than a century, are becoming clear. ESA is carefully assessing the information as crucial input for developing the Agency’s asteroid-hunting effort. At 03:20 GMT on 15 February, a natural object entered the atmosphere and disintegrated in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Extensive video records indicate a northeast to southwest path at a shallow angle of 20° above the horizontal. The...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As reports continue to stream in through various media outlets on injuries, damages, and the science behind such events, it seems this morning’s (February 15) meteor strike in Russia’s Ural Mountains region has left a pretty big impression far and wide. At last count more than 1,200 people (at least 200 children) are believed to have been injured by the meteor, most from broken glass produced by the exploding object's...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A meteor streaked across Russia’s early morning skies on Friday before violently exploding, sending a rain of debris onto the Earth below. The flash and boom shattered windows and meteor particles left damage in its wake, injuring more than 900 people in the Ural Mountains region. Marina Mokvicheva, regional health minister in Chelyabinsk, the Russian city that had felt the brunt of the impact, told the Washington Post that 985...

Protecting the Earth from an extinction-threatening asteroid has in the past been left up to Hollywood, which has deployed a barrage of special effects box office blockbusters that have kept deadly space rocks from smashing our planet into oblivion. But now, Scottish engineers have come up with a plausible way of dealing with asteroids that doesn’t include Hollywood special effects. Engineers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are developing an innovative technique based on...

An investigation by the University of Kansas' Adrian Melott and colleagues reveals a promising new method of detecting past comet strikes upon Earth and gauging their frequencyIt's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside.But this isn't a disaster movie plotline."Comet impacts might be much more frequent than we expect," said...

U.S. scientists say research involving the exhaust plume from a NASA space shuttle launch suggests the 1908 Tunguska explosion was caused by a comet The mysterious explosion leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest and a cause has never been determined. But Cornell University researchers say findings from their study indicated the explosion was nearly certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere. It's almost like putting together a 100-year-old murder mystery, said...

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.The research, accepted for publication (June 24, 2009) by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, connects the two events by what...

On Monday, an asteroid the size of a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed by Earth, according to astronomers.The Planetary Society, as well as astronomers' blogs, reported on Monday, that asteroid 2009 DD45, which is estimated to be 68 to 152 feet across, raced by Earth at 1:44 p.m. GMT on Monday.The gap between the asteroid and the Earth was only 44,750 miles, which is a fifth the distance between our planet and the moon.The size of the...