3 Ton Meteorite Stolen 273
morpheus83 writes "Russian news agency Interfax is reporting that thieves have stolen a three-ton meteorite from the yard of the Tunguska Space Event foundation, whose director said it was the part of meteor that caused a massive explosion in Siberia in 1908. The massive three tonne rock was bought to Krasnoyarsk after an 2004 expedition to the site of the so-called Tunguska event- a mysterious mid air explosion over Siberia in 1908 was 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The foundation's director Yury Lavbin claimed to have discovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft during the expedition."
Tunguska Event (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unsolved? (Score:3, Informative)
BadAstronomy has covered it already... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/12/thi
Re:Unsolved? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unsolved? (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently their idea is a large stony or iron object was the cause of the blast, but part of it made a big divot in the landscape downrange. Because of the nature of the ground, it didn't look like a crater, more like someone sticking a broom handle in the mud. (Cracks and a hole, not ejecta, rim and round hole.) I think the link came from Slashdot or Fark.
But, based on surveys of the rest of the area looking for stony or iron debris have not found much.
So I call "Typical Russian BS" on this as well.
It would be a HUGE discovery to have pegged the event with some physical remains, that's a popular subject amongst science-geeks, conspiracy theorists and Slashdot.
For something to have been sitting in a museum (not studied?!) for three years and not noticed makes this look like insurance fraud more than anything else.
Re:BadAstronomy has covered it already... (Score:5, Informative)
Covered? The "coverage" consists of:
I don't think that's particularly good coverage
Anyway, here is a 2004 story from what looks to be a reputable science website [physorg.com] on the discovery of the meteorite, with photo
Re:Unsolved? (Score:2, Informative)
Little Boy is around 20,000 smaller than the largest nukes the US has ever made.
Kinetic energy equation is 1/2*m*v^2
1 Kiloton of dynamite is 4.184x10^12 joules of energy
A little bit of algerbra determines that a 3 ton object going over 56,000 meters per second would have more power than the "Little Boy" bomb. To make it 10,000 times larger just increase velocity by 100 fold (since velocity is squared). That means it would have to be going 5,600,00 meters/second, or approximately 1/50th the speed of light. I don't know if objects fly through space at that speed though... I just know how to work the math.
Re:BadAstronomy has covered it already... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:BadAstronomy has covered it already... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Ok, Russian is my native language, so I searched for this 'foundation'. Here is the original news: http://www.radiomayak.ru/tvp.html?id=87757&cid= [radiomayak.ru]
This foundation is called 'Fond Tungusskogo Kosmicheskogo Fenomena' in Russian. So I've searched information about it in the most popular Russian search engine (it understands Russian morphology and works much better than Google): http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=%D2%F3%ED%E3
This is the report about the initial "discovery" of this stone: http://www.membrana.ru/articles/misinterpretation
One of the first entries: http://www.newslab.ru/news/174070/print [newslab.ru] - basically, this "foundation" was being kicked out of a museum.
After that, there was exactly ZERO publications in reliable magazines about this discovery. For me, this smells of pseudoscience.
Mirror! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cry Wolf? (Score:2, Informative)
That mean 4.5 ft length on each axis roughly (since it is irregular and all). It is nothing a hoist and a few straps couldn't lift into a suitable truck.
If the density was higher as they say the composition maybe iron, those dimension will be even smaller.
Re:BadAstronomy has covered it already... (Score:4, Informative)
Covered? The "coverage" consists of:
I don't think that's particularly good coverage
Anyway, here is a 2004 story from what looks to be a reputable science website [physorg.com] on the discovery of the meteorite, with photo
If the Bad Astronomer is not good enough for you, how about articles from Space.com [space.com] and MSNBC [msn.com] which were written in August 2004, when the foundation claimed to have found the alien spacecraft parts. Neither article gives much credence to the claim that the team's claimed dicovery. The foundation said at the time that they would be providing evidence (the recovered "spacecraft parts") but 3 years later they have yet to do so. The Bad Astronomer did not write a lengthy article because any rational being already knows that this foundation is full of shit. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and they have provided none.