A new calculation by Mark Boslough, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, shows that the tree-fall pattern in Siberia is consistent with an asteroid coming from the same area in the sky as the Taurid meteor swarm.
Boslough and physicist Peter Brown of Western University in London, Ontario, gave a presentation at a American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington this month in which they called for a special observation campaign this June to search for Tunguska-class or larger objects embedded in the Taurids.
In some years, Earth passes near the densest cluster of material in the Taurid stream - and 2019 will be such a year.
The scientists say it presents potentially the richest batch of incoming material since 1975, when seismometres left on the moon by Apollo astronauts recorded a spike in impacts during the Taurid swarm.
"If the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream . . . then the last week of June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near misses," their AGU presentation stated.
"While we are not predicting another Tunguska airburst, an enhanced population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in the Beta Taurids would increase the probability of another such event on or near next year's Tunguska anniversary," they concluded.
To be clear, no one is saying that June should be declared National Wear a Helmet Month.
Even if there is an "enhanced" number of Tunguska-class objects in the Taurid stream, the probability of one hitting Earth remains very low. Space rocks rarely come even as close as our moon.
Experts have a simple explanation for this: Space is big. It's so much easier to miss the Earth than to hit it. Of course, it can happen, and it did in 2013, when an object smaller than the Tunguska impactor slammed into the atmosphere in Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk, creating a fireball and a shock wave that shattered windows and injured more than 1000 people.
In all of recorded human history, the number of people killed by asteroid impacts is zero.
"This is not something that should be keeping you up at night," Brown said.
Astronomer Amy Mainzer, who hunts for asteroids at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is principal investigator for the proposed Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOcam), an infrared space telescope that would scout Earth's orbit for potentially hazardous asteroids, said scientists have identified more than 90 per cent of the objects large enough to cause a global-scale disaster.
But moving down the size scale, the census is far spottier. Only about 30 per cent of medium-size objects - 140m in diameter or larger - have been spotted. And she said only about 1 per cent of objects have been found that are the size of the Tunguska impactor, which was about 40m in diameter. She said she welcomed the idea of a special effort to look for objects during the Taurid swarm in June.
One other reassuring note: The large asteroids so far identified do not pose any significant threat to Earth, as far as anyone can discern.
"There are no objects in our catalogue that have any significant impact probability in the next 100 years," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Centre for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He noted that the asteroid Bennu - currently under scrutiny by Nasa's Osiris-REx space probe - has a very small chance of hitting Earth a couple of hundred years from now. "That one we're going to keep an eye on," he said, but added, "There are no highly concerning asteroids."
