Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2019

SMALL BODIES 25 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 J ust over 111 years have passed since the famous Tunguska event, and during this long period, various hypotheses have been put forward as to what really hap- pened. Even today in the scientific literature, research is reported that attempts to accu- rately determine the nature of the celestial body that caused the disaster and to calcu- late the probability that one day a similar event might be repeated in an area not nec- essarily uninhabited, as was the case at Tun- guska. Among the most recent works on this topic is research inspired by a seminar held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and sponsored by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The results were published in a series of articles in a special issue of the magazine Icarus. Thanks also to the direct study of more recent minor events, such as the one of Chelyabinsk, the research as a whole has improved the sce- nario described so far by previous works. I n the background, a dramatic repre- sentation of the Tunguska event moments before the explosion of the asteroid in the Siberian sky.