Small asteroids have giant impacts

Published by Cheetezz | Filed under education, science

People may find these asteroids very small in size compared to normal asteroids, but do not judge a book by its cover. They actually pose bigger threats than what is thought until now. The infamous Tunguska explosion a century ago may have been caused by these small asteroids. The explosion itself made the forest in Siberia level with the flat ground, and the area of the forest that was levelled was of the size of Tokyo. In response to this issue, scientists urge that they themselves have to make an effort to detect smaller asteroids than those that they can detect till now. The Tunguska explosion was estimated to have the destruction power of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT, which is 1,000 times more powerful than the explosion by atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the Pacific War 1945. After multiple researches done on the explosion, the new supercomputer simulation suggests that the explosion may be caused by the rapid falling of small asteroids, as small as 65 feet (20 meters) in diameter.