Studies Reveal How A Black Hole Might Be Behind The Russia Atomic Bomb Blast

There has never been a definitive explanation for the massive explosion that rocked a portion of Russia over a century ago. However, scientists think it might have been the outcome of a close encounter with an enigmatic type of black hole.

On June 30, 1908, shortly after 7 a.m., the remarkable explosion took place over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now modern-day Siberia. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, with an estimated force of up to 15 megatons of TNT.

The impact was audible up to 1,000 kilometers away, and the phenomena leveled about 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of the surrounding ground, an area larger than London. A local farmer named Semyon Semyonov, who resided 70 kilometers southeast of the blast's epicenter, described his experience in 1927, saying:

"I sat on the steps of my house facing north. Suddenly the sky in the north split apart, and there appeared a fire that spread over the whole northern part of the firmament. At this moment I felt intense heat, as if my shirt had caught fire. I wished to tear my shirt off and throw it away, but at this moment a powerful blast threw me down from the steps.

“I fainted, but my wife ran from the house and helped me up. After that, we heard a very loud knocking, as if stones were falling from the sky," he added.

A map showing where the disaster happened

Wikipedia via NASA

Other witnesses reported seeing a "second sun" above them while the sky was filled with brilliant lights and tremendous roars, and flaming trees crashed down all around them. Others reported witnessing a "blindingly bright body of bluish-white color that was flying above for about 10 minutes" that "looked like a tube" near the village of Nizhne-Karelinskoye, which is roughly 450 kilometers from the epicenter.

There was an enormous mass of black smoke and a loud knocking, but not of thunder,” said tthe local newspaper Sibir. "The buildings were trembling and a fire of indefinite shape gushed out from [a] small dark cloud."

“All the village inhabitants ran from their houses in terror. Women were crying and everyone thought Armageddon had arrived.’’

A generated image demonstrating how black hole silhouettes are created by stellar black holes bending starry backgrounds and capturing light

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The most perplexing part of the entire incident was that no crater was left behind, even though specialists generally concluded that the event must have been caused by an asteroid collision. In fact, even if some experts assert that it formed a nearby lake, the absence of a huge hole is still a major point of contention.

The enigma has inevitably given rise to a wide variety of theories, such as the somewhat ludicrous theory that the explosion was created by a primordial black hole that passed straight through the Earth. Primordial black holes are the smallest of the three primary forms of black holes.

"Stellar" black holes, the most prevalent type (medium-sized ones), are created when a big star's core collapses on itself. The greatest type, known as "supermassive," was probably created when supermassive stars collapsed in the early cosmos.

They can expand further by consuming smaller objects or merging with other supermassive black holes. Furthermore, scientists have not yet discovered conclusive evidence that the primordials, the group's runts, actually exist or have ever existed.

Millions of trees fell because of the blast

“Scientists theorise that primordial black holes formed in the first second after the birth of the universe. In that moment, pockets of hot material may have been dense enough to form black holes, potentially with masses ranging from 100,000 times less than a paperclip to 100,000 times more than the Sun’s," says NASA.

"Then as the universe quickly expanded and cooled, the conditions for forming black holes this way ended.”Leonid Kulik

Furthermore, some primordial black holes might still exist across the universe even though it's very likely that they all vanished as the universe became older. In fact, some researchers have even proposed that tiny primordial black holes—smaller than an atom—may be innocuously traveling across Earth every day.

A group of physicists from the University of Texas then proposed in a 1973 paper that was published in the journal Nature that the Tunguska explosion might have been the result of a larger primordial black hole smashing through the globe. The researchers proposed that the absence of an impact crater and the ethereal blue "tube" described by witnesses could be explained by a black hole with the mass of a large asteroid.

The experts then proposed that the black hole might have left an exit wound on the opposite side of the Earth even if it did not leave a crater."

Because of its high velocity and because it loses only a small fraction of its energy in passing through the Earth, the black hole should very nearly follow a straight line through the Earth, entering at 30° to the horizon and leaving through the North Atlantic in the region 40°-50° N 30°-40° W.

“This exit provides a check for the whole hypothesis."

NASA

The authors then suggested that research be done to look for ocean disturbances and shockwaves in and around that possible "exit" location. Let's just say that since then, no such proof has been discovered, and the existence of primordial black holes is still a mystery.

According to IFL Science, the widely accepted theory is that an asteroid, or meteoroid, that was between 50 and 80 meters (160 and 262 feet) diameter erupted in an airburst 10 to 14 kilometers (six to nine miles) above the ground. The celestial missile is thought to have weighed around 220 million pounds (99 million kilograms), reached the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of about 54,000 kilometers per hour (33,555 miles per hour), and then broke up into several balls of fire.

The explosion's abrupt release of energy created a strong shockwave that destroyed everything in its path

NASA

But because the blast occurred up in the air, no impact crater was created. Still, the remoteness of the region where the disaster took place and the limited instrumentation available at the time means we don’t have definitive proof of what caused the extraordinary event.

The good news is, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich, a Tunguska-type event is only expected to occur, on average, once every century. Is that really a good news though? Your guess is as good as mine.