The possibility that The asteroid 2024 YR4 Impact against Earth on December 22, 2032 It has brought back to the present what would be the effects of such an event. In this case, we talk about an asteroid with a diameter of Between 40 and 90 meters That, although the probability is decreasing, it cannot be ruled out. The answer to what could happen if an asteroid like 2024 YR4 would fall on Earth we already had it a little over a century ago, with the event known as The rapid – a celest body that crosses the atmosphere – Tunguska.
He took place June 30, 1908in the Siberian region then known as Yeniseisk And now like Krai of Krasnoyarsknear the river Tunguska That has given him name. According to testimonies of the time, A fireball crossed the sky after which an explosion occurred that swept 80 million trees in a forest area of 2,150 km². Despite all the destruction originated, There was no crater that demonstrated the impact of a meteorite. The explosion was recorded in seismic stations in Europe and Asia and air waves of the explosion were detected in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, the United Kingdom, and even even Batavia and Washington DC what had happened?
The remoteness of the affected area and the limitations of the time prevented conclusions for a long time. In fact, The first scientific expedition that investigated the Tunguska Carbolide, which is the largest recorded impact event, did not take place until almost 20 years later, in 1927. It was then when Leonid Kulikleader of the expedition, proposed the impact theory A meteoroid. Why wasn’t there crater then?
The most accepted theory, among the many generated by the event over the years, is that the object, which is estimated to have a diameter of Between 50 and 190 meters, it disintegrated in the atmosphere at an altitude of between 5 and 8 kilometers. The shock wave of the outbreak would have measured 5.0 On the Richter magnitude scale and the released energy is estimated between 3 and 30 TNT megatons; that is, between 200 and 2,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The Tunguska River area was barely inhabited, but such an event in a populated area would be catastrophic.
However, the absence of crater allowed the imagination about what had happened freely. In 1965Nature raised the possibility that it would have been An antimatter meteorite what impacted and in 1973 he published that he could be A black hole!theory that Nature himself refuted a few months later.
The confirmation that it was a standard meteor came with The discovery of meteoric remains in Tunguska in 1978micromanras whose composition with origin outside the earth was confirmed in 2013.
However, this is not the only plausible theory about what happened in Tunguska. In 2020 the idea that it was not the impact or disintegration of an asteroid, but of A kite that crossed the atmosphere and could follow its trajectory escaping the gravitational force of the Earthwhich would again justify the absence of a crater despite the strength of the explosion.
Tunguska’s car had a similar size or greater than the one estimated of 2024 YR4which gives an idea of what could happen if the current forecasts of NASA and ESA were confirmed.