Hello, welcome back to day two of our 20-day adventure through strange and

amazing places. This week it is all about space. And since we are still in the

holiday spirit here, I thought I'd give you the gift of space terror.

Every single night, around 25 million asteroids hit the atmosphere.

They sprinkled dozens of tons of space dust

all across the Earth.

Every night we live under this dusty rain of the great beyond.

Yesterday we met an interstellar object that became a shooting star as it burned up across our atmosphere. that

object that became a shooting star as it burned up across our atmosphere. Today, we're going to hear about what happens when that shooting star makes it a little closer to Earth,

when something very big gets through.

This holiday season, look into the night sky

and hold your loved ones a little tighter. On June 30th, 1908, 1908, an astronomer working in Ireland wrote down an unusual observation.

The astronomer recorded that there was, quote, a nocturnal glow that night, that it was

bright enough to read a newspaper by.

Except on that night, there was hardly any moon.

It was a waxing crescent, just barely visible.

The nocturnal glow that the astronomer was seeing was the effect of an incident that occurred half a world away

More than 3,000 miles away in northern Siberia,

80 million trees had been flattened to the ground,

and they laid out in a circular radius pattern.

At the very center of the radius, the trees still stood straight up. They were burnt

to a crisp, their bark stripped away. It was like a forest of telephone poles.

...