Why was there an explosion in Tanguska in 1908?

Question

I think a space ship was blown up, by are protectors.The space ship was coming to steal all the rare minerals from the Kondyor Massif.

Answer 1

No Joe. It was just an exploding comet!

Answer 2

It was simply a comet or garden variety asteroid.

Answer 3

actually it was ppl from the future neglecting to follow rules about time travel. u see ted went back in time and accidently banged his great great great great great great great grandmother. she as a result never got with his great great great great great great great grandfather. and as a result he imploded due to this paradox. how he got that high into the sky is a matter of speculation.

sound ridiculous? so does urs...

Answer 4

In Brief:

At 7:17 AM on the morning of June 30, 1908, a mysterious explosion occurred in the skies over Siberia. It was caused by the impact and breakup of a large meteorite, at an altitude roughly six kilometers in the atmosphere. Realistic pictures of the event are unavailable. However, Russian scientists collected eyewitness accounts of the event. I believe that we now know enough about large impacts to "decode" the subjective descriptions of the witnesses and create realistic views of this historic asteroid impact as seen from different distances.

What do we know about the explosion?

You can get a sense of the magnitude of this event by comparing observations made at different distances. Seismic vibrations were recorded by sensitive instruments as much as 1000 km (600 mi) away. At 500 km (300 mi), observers reported "deafening bangs" and a fiery cloud on the horizon. About 170 km (110 mi) from the explosion, the object was seen in the cloudless, daytime sky as a brilliant, sunlike fireball; thunderous noises were heard. At distances around 60 km, people were thrown to the ground or even knocked unconscious; windows were broken and crockery knocked off shelves. Probably the closest observers were some reindeer herders asleep in their tents in several camps about 30 km (20 mi) from the site. They were blown into the air and knocked unconscious; one man was blown into a tree and later died. "Everything around was shrouded in smoke and fog from the burning fallen trees."

Because the meteorite did not strike the ground or make a crater, early researchers thought the object might be a weak, icy fragment of a comet, which vaporized explosively in the air, and left no residue on the ground. However, modern planetary scientists have much better tools for understanding meteorite explosion in the atmosphere. As a meteorite slams into the atmosphere at speeds around 12 to 20 km/sec or more, it experiences a strong mechanical shock, like a diver bellyflopping into water. This can break apart stones of a certain size range, which explode instead of hitting the ground. Some of them drop brick-sized fragments on the ground, but others, such as the one that hit Siberia, may produce primarily a fireball and cloud of fine dust and tiny fragments. In 1993 researchers Chris Chyba, Paul Thomas, and Kevin Zahnle studied the Siberian explosion and concluded it was of this type -- a stone meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere. This conclusion was supported when Russian researchers found tiny stoney particles embedded in the trees at the collision site, matching the composition of common stone meteorites. The original asteroid fragment may have been roughly 50-60 meters (50-60 yards) in diameter.