Earth and Planetary Science

The Structure of the Tunguska Comet

Olga G. Gladysheva

Ioffe Institute, Politekhnicheskaya st. 26, St. Petersburg, 194021, Russia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36956/eps.v3i1.924

Received: 12 August 2023; Received in revised form: 13 December 2023; Accepted: 18 December 2023; Published: 28 December 2023

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Abstract

The collision of the Tunguska cosmic body with the Earth occurred more than a hundred years ago. However, the question of the nature of the cosmic body is still being actively discussed. Here, the author demonstrated that the Tunguska cosmic body was indeed a comet, the nucleus of which had a layered structure separated by gas-tight closed partitions. Thanks to these partitions, comets can penetrate the dense layers of the atmosphere, breaking up and losing layers one by one. Here, the author shows that the Tunguska body could have been decelerated by the atmosphere, in which case the explosion above the epicentre would have been a volumetric explosion of a mixture of dispersed cosmic matter and atmospheric oxygen. The author proposes one of the possible methods for the formation of cometary nuclei with partitions at the early stages of the evolution of a protoplanetary nebula.

Keywords: Tunguska cosmic body, Comet structure, Formation of cometary nuclei

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