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Scientist says he found meteorite that hit
Earth in 1908
Saturday May 04, 2013 09:12:55 AM,
RIA Novosti
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Moscow: A
Russian researcher has claimed to have discovered fragments of the
largest celestial body to hit the Earth in recorded history - in
1908 -though he has waited for 23 years before going public with
the findings.
Three stones found by Andrei Zlobin of the Vernadsky State
Geological Museum at the Russian Academy of Sciences in central
Siberia may have been part of the so-called Tunguska meteorite
that exploded over the area in 1908, he said in a report on
Arxiv.org.
Though the Tunguska blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the
nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, scientists have
failed to find any fragments of the celestial body that caused it.
A popular theory puts the Tunguska event down to an ice asteroid
or comet that exploded in the atmosphere and evaporated without a
trace.
But Zlobin said that he found several fragments of the Tunguska
bolide during a 1988 expedition to the area where the event took
place.
Three stone bodies found on the shoal of the Khushmo river near
the impact site have traces of melting and regmaglypts, or
indentations formed during a meteorite’s passing through the
atmosphere, he said.
The samples, which are still pending a chemical analysis, were
mothballed until 2008, Zlobin said, without elaborating on the
reasons.
Russian academia suffered a dramatic decline after the Soviet
Union's demise in 1991 due to lack of funding.
Even if their link to the Tunguska event is confirmed, the samples
would not necessarily disprove the ice comet theory because the
comet's nucleus could have contained small stone bodies, the study
said.
It added that calculations show the Tunguska object had density
comparable to that of the nucleus of Halley's Comet, made up of
ice and dust.
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