The 1908 Tunguska cosmic body (TCB) explosion: Role of hydrogen thermonuclear explosion in support of cometary hypothesis

If the 1908 Tunguska cosmic body (TCB) explosion involved a comet, compressional heating of the comet was expected to create hydrogen and deuterium plasma. The velocity distribution of protons and deuterons in this plasma is not expected to be the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. It is shown that the use of a generalized momentum distribution leads to substantial increases of deuteron fusion rates and that a thermonuclear explosion may compete with a thermo-chemical explosion. Therefore, it may be possible that a thermo-chemical explosion induced a hydrogen thermonuclear explosion and both the thermo-chemical and thermonuclear explosions occurred in the 1908 Tunguska event. Experimental tests of this hypothesis are proposed. The explosion on 30 June 1908 over Tunguska, Central Siberia, released 30 megatons (TNT equivalent) of energy at an altitude of 5 km without creating crater(s) on the Earth’s surface. Many hypotheses (antimatter, a small black hole, carbonaceous asteroids, comets, etc.) have been proposed. Recent measurements of anomalous isotope ratios in the 1908 peat layers at and near the epicenter have ruled out most of the proposed hypotheses, and provide many supporting evidences for the cometary hypothesis [1]. The cometary core consists mostly of frozen ice. Compressional heating explosion of falling cometary bodies in the atmosphere was proposed as early as in 1930, and has been investigated theoretically [1]. A Presented at the 20th Few-Body Conference, Pisa, Italy, 10–14 September 2007 E-mail address: [email protected] Correspondence: Y. E. Kim, Department of Physics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA possibility of thermonuclear explosion with the conventional Maxwell-Boltzmann momentum distribution was ruled out for falling cometary bodies [2]. Based on earlier works on quantum field-theoretic techniques developed by Galitskii and Migdal [3] and Galitskii [4] in 1958 (see also the book by Abrikosov et al. [5]), Galitskii and Yakimets (GY) [6] in 1966 showed that the quantum energy indeterminacy due to interactions between particles in a plasma leads to a generalized momentum distribution which has a high-energy momentum distribution tail diminishing as an inverse eighth power of the momentum, instead of the conventional Maxwell-Boltzmann (MB) distribution tail decaying exponentially. GY’s generalized distribution function f ðpÞ by GY [6],