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

Abstract

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.