No Black Hole Or Magnetic Monopole: Tunguska Really Was a Meteor

davide-nature writes "The mysterious blast that flattened 2,000 square km of a remote Siberian forest in 1908 has been blamed on the most bizarre causes, such as an exotic elementary particle left over from the Big Bang, a black hole or, of course, aliens, including in the double-episode 'Tunguska' of The X-Files. But a new analysis of tiny rock samples suggests that a more mundane explanation — a meteor exploding in the atmosphere — may be the right one. The blast is estimated to have packed between 3 and 5 megatons, 10 times the energy of the meteor that exploded over Russia earlier this year."

It's amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing that so many people preferred/prefer to believe that black holes or UFO's were the cause of the Tunguska event. Why is it so hard, for some people, to believe the most probable cause, a meteor, was the cause? Just looking at the moon shows that meteor impacts are not uncommon.

Re:Hm, wasn't aware there was any controversy

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The serious answer to the joking rhetorical question is that tile layers who like to play geometric patterns stumbled upon the properties of the 3-4-5 triangle. That 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5 is completely obvious when the tile pattern is laying down right in front of you. It is trivial to demonstrate a triangle is right (or at least that is so extremely close to be a right triangle that no one cares about its variance) by physical inspection, applying a folding/flipping operation. The nature of such triangle became common enough knowledge, even if the proof did not come into existence for a long time later. The hard part is figuring out what to try and prove.