Even as a child, being a curious child, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. And naturally, as I grew up, my interest turned to the stars. Gradually reading books on astronomy and physics, I slowly studied the basics. At the same time as reading books, I mastered the map of the starry sky. Because I grew up in a village, so I had a fairly good view of the starry sky. Now in my free time I continue to read books, publications and try to follow modern scientific achievements in this field of knowledge. In the future I would like to purchase my own telescope.

Astronomy is the science of the movement, structure and development of celestial bodies and their systems, up to the Universe as a whole.

Man, at his core, has an extraordinary curiosity that leads him to study the world around him, so astronomy gradually arose in all corners of the world where people lived.

Astronomical activity can be traced in sources from at least the 6th-4th millennium BC. e., and the earliest mentions of the names of the luminaries are found in the “Pyramid Texts”, dating from the 25th-23rd centuries. BC e. - a religious monument. Certain features of megalithic structures and even rock paintings of primitive people are interpreted as astronomical. There are also many similar motifs in folklore.

Figure 1 – Heavenly disk from Nebra

So, one of the first “astronomers” can be called the Sumerians and Babylonians. The Babylonian priests left many astronomical tables. They also identified the main constellations and the zodiac, introduced the division of a full angle into 360 degrees, and developed trigonometry. In the 2nd millennium BC. e. The Sumerians developed a lunar calendar, improved in the 1st millennium BC. e. The year consisted of 12 synodic months - six of 29 days and six of 30 days, for a total of 354 days. Having processed their observation tables, the priests discovered many laws of the movement of the planets, the Moon and the Sun, and were able to predict eclipses. It was probably in Babylon that the seven-day week appeared (each day was dedicated to one of the 7 luminaries). But not only the Sumerians had their own calendar; Egypt created its own “sothic” calendar. The sothic year is the period between the two heliacal risings of Sirius, that is, it coincided with the sidereal year, and the civil year consisted of 12 months of 30 days plus five additional days, for a total of 365 days. A lunar calendar with a metonic cycle, consistent with the civil one, was also used in Egypt. Later, under the influence of Babylon, a seven-day week appeared. The day was divided into 24 hours, which at first were unequal (separately for light and dark times of the day), but at the end of the 4th century BC. e. have acquired a modern look. The Egyptians also divided the sky into constellations. Evidence of this can include references in texts, as well as drawings on the ceilings of temples and tombs.

Among the countries of East Asia, ancient astronomy received the greatest development in China. In China there were two positions of court astronomers. Around the 6th century BC. e. The Chinese specified the length of the solar year (365.25 days). Accordingly, the celestial circle was divided into 365.25 degrees or 28 constellations (according to the movement of the Moon). Observatories appeared in the 12th century BC. e. But much earlier, Chinese astronomers diligently recorded all unusual events in the sky. The first record of the appearance of a comet dates back to 631 BC. e., about a lunar eclipse - by 1137 BC. e., about the solar - by 1328 BC. e., the first meteor shower was described in 687 BC. e. Among other achievements of Chinese astronomy, it is worth noting the correct explanation of the causes of solar and lunar eclipses, the discovery of the uneven movement of the Moon, the measurement of the sidereal period, first for Jupiter, and from the 3rd century BC. e. - and for all other planets, both sidereal and synodic, with good accuracy. There were many calendars in China. By the 6th century BC. e. The Metonic cycle was discovered and the lunisolar calendar was established. The beginning of the year is the winter solstice, the beginning of the month is the new moon. The day was divided into 12 hours (the names of which were also used as the names of months) or into 100 parts.

Parallel to China, on the opposite side of the earth, the Mayan civilization is in a hurry to acquire astronomical knowledge, as evidenced by numerous archaeological excavations at the sites of the cities of this civilization. The ancient Mayan astronomers were able to predict eclipses, and very carefully observed various, most clearly visible astronomical objects, such as the Pleiades, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The remains of cities and observatory temples look impressive. Unfortunately, only 4 manuscripts of different ages and texts on steles have survived. The Mayans determined with great accuracy the synodic periods of all 5 planets (Venus was especially revered), and came up with a very accurate calendar. The Mayan month contained 20 days, and the week - 13. Astronomy also developed in India, although it did not have much success there. Among the Incas, astronomy is directly related to cosmology and mythology, this is reflected in many legends. The Incas knew the difference between stars and planets. In Europe, the situation was worse, but the Druids of the Celtic tribes definitely had some kind of astronomical knowledge.

In the early stages of its development, astronomy was thoroughly mixed with astrology. The attitude of scientists towards astrology in the past has been controversial. Educated people in general have always been skeptical about natal astrology. But the belief in universal harmony and the search for connections in nature stimulated the development of science. Therefore, the natural interest of ancient thinkers was aroused by natural astrology, which established an empirical connection between celestial phenomena of a calendar nature and signs of weather, harvest, and the timing of household work. Astrology originates from Sumerian-Babylonian astral myths, in which celestial bodies (Sun, Moon, planets) and constellations were associated with gods and mythological characters; the influence of gods on earthly life within the framework of this mythology was transformed into the influence on the life of celestial bodies - symbols deities Babylonian astrology was borrowed by the Greeks and then, through contacts with the Hellenistic world, penetrated into India. The final identification of scientific astronomy occurred during the Renaissance and took a long time.

The formation of astronomy as a science should probably be attributed to the ancient Greeks, because they made a huge contribution to the development of science. The works of ancient Greek scientists contain the origins of many ideas that underlie the science of modern times. There is a relationship of direct continuity between modern and ancient Greek astronomy, while the science of other ancient civilizations influenced modern one only through the mediation of the Greeks.

In Ancient Greece, astronomy was already one of the most developed sciences. To explain the visible movements of the planets, Greek astronomers, the largest of them Hipparchus (2nd century BC), created the geometric theory of epicycles, which formed the basis of the geocentric system of the world of Ptolemy (2nd century AD). Although fundamentally incorrect, Ptolemy's system nevertheless made it possible to pre-calculate the approximate positions of the planets in the sky and therefore satisfied, to a certain extent, practical needs for several centuries.

The Ptolemaic world system completes the stage of development of ancient Greek astronomy. The development of feudalism and the spread of the Christian religion entailed a significant decline in the natural sciences, and the development of astronomy in Europe slowed down for many centuries. During the Dark Middle Ages, astronomers were concerned only with observing the apparent movements of the planets and reconciling these observations with the accepted geocentric system of Ptolemy.

During this period, astronomy received rational development only among the Arabs and the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, in the works of outstanding astronomers of that time - Al-Battani (850-929), Biruni (973-1048), Ulugbek (1394-1449) .) etc. During the period of the emergence and formation of capitalism in Europe, which replaced feudal society, the further development of astronomy began. It developed especially quickly during the era of great geographical discoveries (XV-XVI centuries). The emerging new bourgeois class was interested in exploiting new lands and equipped numerous expeditions to discover them. But long journeys across the ocean required more accurate and simpler methods of orientation and time calculation than those that the Ptolemaic system could provide. The development of trade and navigation urgently required the improvement of astronomical knowledge and, in particular, the theory of planetary motion. The development of productive forces and the requirements of practice, on the one hand, and the accumulated observational material, on the other, prepared the ground for a revolution in astronomy, which was carried out by the great Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who developed his heliocentric system of the world, published in the year his death.

The teachings of Copernicus were the beginning of a new stage in the development of astronomy. Kepler in 1609-1618. the laws of planetary motion were discovered, and in 1687 Newton published the law of universal gravitation.

New astronomy gained the opportunity to study not only the visible, but also the actual movements of celestial bodies. Her numerous and brilliant successes in this area were crowned in the middle of the 19th century. the discovery of the planet Neptune, and in our time - the calculation of the orbits of artificial celestial bodies.

Astronomy and its methods are of great importance in the life of modern society. Issues related to measuring time and providing humanity with knowledge of exact time are now being resolved by special laboratories - time services, organized, as a rule, at astronomical institutions.

Astronomical orientation methods, along with others, are still widely used in navigation and aviation, and in recent years - in astronautics. The calculation and compilation of the calendar, which is widely used in the national economy, is also based on astronomical knowledge.

Figure 2 – Gnomon - the oldest goniometer tool

Drawing up geographical and topographic maps, pre-calculating the onset of sea tides, determining the force of gravity at various points on the earth's surface in order to detect mineral deposits - all this is based on astronomical methods.

Studies of processes occurring on various celestial bodies allow astronomers to study matter in states that have not yet been achieved in earthly laboratory conditions. Therefore, astronomy, and in particular astrophysics, which is closely related to physics, chemistry, and mathematics, contributes to the development of the latter, and they, as we know, are the basis of all modern technology. Suffice it to say that the question of the role of intra-atomic energy was first raised by astrophysicists, and the greatest achievement of modern technology - the creation of artificial celestial bodies (satellites, space stations and ships) would generally be unthinkable without astronomical knowledge.

Astronomy is of exceptionally great importance in the fight against idealism, religion, mysticism and clericalism. Its role in the formation of a correct dialectical-materialistic worldview is enormous, for it is it that determines the position of the Earth, and with it man, in the world around us, in the Universe. Observations of celestial phenomena themselves do not give us grounds to directly discover their true causes. In the absence of scientific knowledge, this leads to their incorrect explanation, to superstition, mysticism, and to the deification of the phenomena themselves and individual celestial bodies. For example, in ancient times the Sun, Moon and planets were considered deities and were worshiped. The basis of all religions and the entire worldview was the idea of ​​​​the central position of the Earth and its immobility. Many people’s superstitions were associated (and even now not everyone has freed themselves from them) with solar and lunar eclipses, with the appearance of comets, with the appearance of meteors and fireballs, the fall of meteorites, etc. So, for example, comets were considered the harbingers of various disasters befalling humanity on Earth (fires, disease epidemics, wars), meteors were mistaken for the souls of dead people flying into the sky, etc.

Astronomy, by studying celestial phenomena, exploring the nature, structure and development of celestial bodies, proves the materiality of the Universe, its natural, regular development in time and space without the intervention of any supernatural forces.

The history of astronomy shows that it has been and remains the arena of a fierce struggle between materialistic and idealistic worldviews. Currently, many simple questions and phenomena no longer determine or cause a struggle between these two basic worldviews. Now the struggle between materialistic and idealistic philosophies is taking place in the area of ​​more complex issues, more complex problems. It concerns the basic views on the structure of matter and the Universe, on the emergence, development and further fate of both individual parts and the entire Universe as a whole.

The twentieth century for astronomy means more than just another hundred years. It was in the 20th century that they learned the physical nature of stars and unraveled the mystery of their birth, studied the world of galaxies and almost completely restored the history of the Universe, visited neighboring planets and discovered other planetary systems.

Having been able at the beginning of the century to measure distances only to the nearest stars, at the end of the century astronomers “reached” almost to the boundaries of the Universe. But until now, measuring distances remains a sore problem in astronomy. It is not enough to “reach out”; it is necessary to accurately determine the distance to the most distant objects; only in this way will we know their true characteristics, physical nature and history.

Advances in astronomy in the 20th century. were closely connected with the revolution in physics. Astronomical data was used to create and test the theory of relativity and the quantum theory of the atom. On the other hand, progress in physics has enriched astronomy with new methods and possibilities.

It is no secret that the rapid growth in the number of scientists in the 20th century. was caused by the needs of technology, mainly military. But astronomy is not as necessary for the development of technology as physics, chemistry, and geology. Therefore, even now, at the end of the 20th century, there are not so many professional astronomers in the world - only about 10 thousand. Not bound by conditions of secrecy, astronomers at the beginning of the century, in 1909, united into the International Astronomical Union (MAC), which coordinates the joint study of a common starry sky for all. Collaboration between astronomers from different countries has especially intensified in the last decade thanks to computer networks.

Figure 3 – Radio telescopes

Now in the 21st century, astronomy faces many tasks, including such complex ones as studying the most general properties of the Universe; this requires the creation of a more general physical theory capable of describing the state of matter and physical processes. To solve this problem, observational data are required in regions of the Universe located at distances of several billion light years. Modern technical capabilities do not allow detailed exploration of these areas. However, this problem is now the most pressing and is being successfully solved by astronomers in a number of countries.

But it is quite possible that these problems will not be the main focus of the new generation of astronomers. Nowadays, the first timid steps are taken by neutrino and gravitational wave astronomy. Probably, in a couple of decades, they will be the ones who will reveal to us a new face of the Universe.

One feature of astronomy remains unchanged, despite its rapid development. The subject of her interest is the starry sky, accessible for admiring and studying from any place on Earth. The sky is the same for everyone, and everyone can study it if they wish. Even now, amateur astronomers make significant contributions to some areas of observational astronomy. And this brings not only benefits to science, but also enormous, incomparable joy for themselves.

Modern technologies make it possible to simulate space objects and provide data to the average user. There are not many such programs yet, but their number is growing and they are constantly being improved. Here are some programs that will be interesting and useful even to people far from astronomy:

• The RedShift computer planetarium, a product of Maris Technologies Ltd., is widely known in the world. This is the best-selling program in its class, it has already earned more than 20 prestigious international awards. The first version appeared back in 1993. It immediately met with an enthusiastic reception from Western users and gained a leading position in the market for full-featured computer planetariums. In fact, RedShift has transformed the global market for software for astronomy enthusiasts. With the power of modern computers, dull columns of numbers are transformed into virtual reality, which contains a high-precision model of the solar system, millions of deep space objects, and an abundance of reference material.
• Google Earth is a Google project in which satellite photographs of the entire earth's surface were posted on the Internet. Photos of some regions have unprecedented high resolution. Unlike other similar services that display satellite images in a regular browser (for example, Google Maps), this service uses a special client program downloaded to the user's computer Google Earth.
• Google Maps is a set of applications built on the free mapping service and technology provided by Google. The service is a map and satellite images of the whole world (as well as the Moon and Mars).
• Celestia is a free 3D astronomy program. The program, based on the HIPPARCOS Catalog, allows the user to view objects ranging in size from artificial satellites to full galaxies in three dimensions using OpenGL technology. Unlike most other virtual planetariums, the user can freely travel around the Universe. Add-ons to the program allow you to add both real-life objects and objects from fictional universes created by their fans.
• KStars is a virtual planetarium included in the KDE Education Project package of educational programs. KStars shows the night sky from anywhere on the planet. You can observe the starry sky not only in real time, but also what it was or will be by indicating the desired date and time. The program displays 130,000 stars, 8 planets of the solar system, the Sun, the Moon, thousands of asteroids and comets.
• Stellarium is a free virtual planetarium. With Stellarium it is possible to see what can be seen with a medium and even large telescope. The program also provides observations of solar eclipses and the movements of comets.

1. "History of Astronomy". Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/History of astronomy
2. "Ancient Astronomy and Modern Astronomy". Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://www.prosvetlenie.org/mystic/7/10.html
3. "The practical and ideological significance of astronomy." Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://space.rin.ru/articles/html/389.html
4. “The beginnings of astronomy. Gnomon is an astronomical instrument." Electronic resource. Access mode: http://www.astrogalaxy.ru/489.html
5. "Astronomy of the XXI century - Astronomy in the XX century." Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://astroweb.ru/hist_/stat23.htm
6. "Astronomy" Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy
7. “Astronomy of the XXI century - Results of the XX and tasks of the XXI century.” Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://astroweb.ru/hist_/stat29.htm
8. "RedShift Computer Planetarium". Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://www.bellabs.ru/RS/index.html
9. Google Earth. Electronic resource.
   Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Planet_Earth
10. Google Maps. Electronic resource.
    Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
11. "Celestia" Electronic resource.
    Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia
12. KStars. Electronic resource.
    Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/KStars
13. "Stellarium" Electronic resource.
    Access mode: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarium

If Winston Churchill could call Russia and its people “a riddle wrapped in a mystery within a riddle,” then you can safely bet that the development of amateur astronomy in my country remains largely unknown to most readers of SKY&Telescore. I hope to dispel some of this mystery by telling our story.
It was said that the father of Russian amateur astronomers was Archbishop Athanasius, who lived in the northern port city of Arkhangelsk, only 150 km from the Arctic Circle. In 1692 he built an observatory equipped with several small refractors, but his observing capabilities were limited by ecclesiastical activities and incursions by Swedish armies.
Meanwhile, the reformer Tsar Peter the Great was raising Russia to the status of a great power. Although his methods were harsh and often crude, he founded the capital of St. Petersburg, founded many schools, and laid the foundation for the Russian Academy of Sciences, where many famous scientists of Europe were invited. Peter the Great observed with a telescope from time to time, and astronomy was quite fashionable during his reign. At the time, it was not unusual for nobles to build private observatories.
Some of Peter's followers also showed interest in astronomical observations. Empress Anna Ioanovna often invited the French astronomer Josep Delisle to show her the rings of Saturn and other bright stellar objects through Newton's long-focus telescope. But it must be recognized that this was the activity of amateurs, and no lasting contributions to science were made by Russian amateur astronomers in the 18th century.
But that was soon to change. Naval officer Plato Gamaleya independently invented the achromatic refractor lens, the invention of which is often attributed exclusively to the Englishmen Chester Moore Hall and John Dollond by Western historians. Gamaleya was also interested in meteorites, claiming that they were of asteroidal origin, despite Antoine Lavoisier's statement to the French Academy of Sciences that "rocks cannot fall from the sky."
In 1879, Vasily Engelhardt, a lawyer from Smolensk, founded an impressive observatory in the city of Dresden (then Saxony, now Germany). Engelhardt ordered a 12-inch refractor from the famous Dublin telescope maker Thomas Grebb. With this impressive telescope, Engelhardt devoted himself to observations. Over the course of 18 years, he published three volumes of meticulous observations of comets, asteroids, nebulae and double stars. He bequeathed all his astronomical equipment and 50,000 rubles to Kazan University, located 600 km east of Moscow, where the observatory that bears his name operates to this day.
Another lover's generosity also had consequences that continue to this day. At the end of the 19th century, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in Pulkovo, there was an outstanding Russian observatory. The latitude at which Pulkovo is located, 60 degrees, put forward a strong need for an observatory located further south, and in 1906 astronomer Alexei Gansky was sent to the Crimean peninsula to find a suitable site.

Soon after his arrival, he came across two domes. As it turned out, Gansky stopped in front of the private observatory of a high-ranking government official, Nikolai Maltsov. During their first meeting, Maltsov offered his observatory as a gift to the Pulkovo Observatory, and even added the adjacent territory for further development. Nowadays, this place - the Simeiz observation station of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory - is home to 24 and 40-inch reflectors used by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

Chasing the moon's shadow

One of the most advanced Russian amateurs of the 19th century was Fyodor Semenov, the son of a successful industrialist in Kursk. Despite the fact that he was self-taught, Semenov was able to make a 4-inch refractor out of nothing, which is a feat even today. His passion was solar eclipses. Semenov was awarded the Gold Medal of the Russian Geographical Society for calculating the visibility of all eclipses that were supposed to occur in the northern hemisphere from 1840 to 2001.
Nikolai Donich, a government worker, devoted himself to chasing eclipses long before commercial airlines made global travel easy. Chasing the lunar shadow, Donich traveled to such exotic places as Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Despite his amateur status, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1905 entrusted Donich to lead eclipse expeditions to Spain and Egypt - he was even assigned a professional astronomer as an assistant!
August 14, 1887 The streak of total eclipse passed through the heart of Russia and caused an increase in public interest in astronomy, leading to the creation of the first astronomical society in the country. Residents of Nizhny Novgorod hired three steam ships for a 150km journey along the Volga to see the eclipse, and heated discussions arose between passengers on the return trip. Horrified by the enormous ignorance of the rural population that they had to face, Platon Demidov, a local attorney and banker, and two young school teachers decided to create a society to spread the knowledge of astronomy to the masses.
But they faced numerous obstacles. Such a scientific society could only be created in a university city. In Nizhny Novgorod there were churches, monasteries, a Kremlin and a drama theater - but there was no university. Fortunately, Demidov’s connections in St. Petersburg led to the abandonment of this requirement, and the official charter of the “Nizhny Novgorod Circle of Physics and Astronomy Lovers” was approved a year later. Demidov donated his personal library and a small telescope, and members raised money to purchase a 4-inch refractor from Merz.

The circle in Nizhny Novgorod survived the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent civil war and terror. Members published results of work on variable stars, corresponded with foreign amateur astronomers, and subscribed to foreign journals - quite unusual activity for that difficult time. They became most famous for their astronomical calendar, published annually since 1895. When Soviet astronomers sent an open letter to Pope Pius XI in 1930, accusing the Roman Catholic Church of burning Giordano Bruno and persecuting Galileo, the Vatican responded: “In the USSR, we know only astronomers from Nizhny Novgorod, with whom we exchange publications. Other persons who call themselves as “Russian astronomers” are unknown to us.”
In 1890, i.e. two years later, after Nizhny Novgorod received its circle, the Russian Astronomical Society was organized. Although membership was not limited to professionals, it was virtually impossible for an amateur to collect the five member recommendations required merely for recognition. The only exception was a 15-year-old Kiev schoolboy, who was the first to report the appearance of Nova in Perseus in 1901. For this discovery he received membership in the Russian Astronomical Society, and Tsar Nicholas II gave him a Zeiss telescope.
In 1908, the “Moscow Circle of Astronomy Lovers” was founded, followed a year later by the “Russian Society of World Science Lovers” or ROLM in St. Petersburg. The word "world science" roughly means "study of the universe," reflecting the broad scientific interests of its founder, Nikolai Morozov. As punishment for his revolutionary activities, Morozov spent 22 years in solitary confinement, and after his release from prison in 1905, he devoted the remaining years of his life to science. Upon reaching 700 members, Mirovedenie founded an observatory equipped with a 7-inch Merz refractor, regularly published observational results, and published the popular journal Mirovedenie.

Soviet Era

The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 brought dramatic changes to every aspect of Russian life, including astronomy. The regimes of Lenin and Stalin demanded that all scientific research be subordinated to the task of "socialist construction" and astronomers were required to take solemn oaths such as "I swear that I will characterize the changes in the brightness of 150 recently discovered variable stars." Each new discovery demonstrated the possibility of socialism being superior to capitalism. When Petrograd astronomer S.M. Selivanov found the comet on September 1, 1919, government officials trumpeted this achievement around the world.
Boris Kukarkin, a Nizhny Novgorod amateur, in 1928 began publishing a newsletter called “Variable Stars”. Then it turned into a professional magazine, and Kukarkin himself became a famous professional astronomer. In the same decade, members of the Moscow Society of Astronomy Amateurs created the “Collective of Observers”. Several of its members, among them Boris A. Vorontsov-Veliaminov and Pavel P. Parenago, became internationally recognized authorities in astronomy. Some conclusions regarding the character of that time can be drawn from the last sentence of Parenago's book "World of Stars", which described I. Stalin as "the greatest genius of all mankind."
During those dark days, many of the core amateurs were repressed. In 1928 the Russian Astronomical Society was dissolved, followed two years later by the ROLM. However, World Studies continued to appear over the next few years and, in order to keep readers up to date with astronomical events in Western countries, contained some translations from foreign journals. However, ideology has penetrated here too. Emerging expanding universe theories were criticized as incompatible with Marxist-Leninist dogma. Mirovedenie ceased publication during the peak of Stalin's terror. Its final issue came with an editorial with the ominous title "To completely suppress sabotage on the astronomical front."
After the publication of World Studies ceased, Soviet amateurs did not have any magazine until 1965, when the popular bimonthly magazine Earth and the Universe appeared. However, its editors always gave more emphasis to geology and meteorology than to astronomy. In the magazine's heyday, its circulation exceeded 50,000 copies, but in recent years it has fallen sharply to less than 1,000 copies.

In 1932, amateur and professional astronomers throughout the Soviet Union united into the All-Union Astronomical-Geodetic Society, otherwise known by the abbreviation VAGO. The first scientific society created in Soviet times, VAGO established branches in dozens of cities, and its Central Council in Moscow coordinated visual observations of variable stars, meteors and noctilucent clouds by amateurs under the guidance of professionals. Became part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1938, VAGO published observation manuals, organized eclipse expeditions, and regularly held conferences and congresses. VAGO's membership peaked in the 1980s, when it had approximately 70 branches scattered throughout. The youth section, created in 1965, coordinated work among isolated circles of young astronomers.

Traditions of telescope construction

The first astronomical optics in Russia was apparently made by Jacob Bruce, one of Peter the Great's close associates, who in 1733 “blinded” a concave mirror for a reflecting telescope. But the first real amateur in telescope construction in our country was Ivan Kulibin. A self-taught mechanic from Nizhny Novgorod, Kulibin in 1767 managed to get his hands on a reflecting telescope of the Gregory system. He was able to determine the composition of his metal mirror—a hard, brittle alloy of copper and tin—and began building a machine to grind and polish mirrors and lenses. Kulibin also processed Flint glass to create achromatic lenses.
Despite the talent of people like Kulibin, Russia was many decades behind in telescope production compared to Europe and the United States. In the 20th century, the domes of our large observatories housed instruments made by German firms such as Fraunhofer, Merz, and Zeiss or American ones such as Alvan Clark. And only in 1904, Yuri Mirkalov founded the first Russian enterprise for the manufacture of telescopes, “Russian Urania”. Before the company's demise in 1917, its workshops produced more than a hundred telescopes and many domes for observatories, although Mirkalov received all the lenses from abroad.

Newtonian reflecting telescopes were popularized in Russia by Alexander Chikin. Four years after he processed his first mirror in 1911, Chikin published the book “Reflective Telescopes: Making Reflectors by Means Available to the Amateur.” For decades, this book has been the standard not only for amateurs, but also for professionals. Renowned optical designer Dmitry Maksutov, inventor of the catadioptric (mirror lens) telescopes now used throughout the world, was just one of many who found inspiration and guidance in the pages of Chikin's little "bible."

In the 1930s, simultaneously with the United States, amateur telescope building became popular in Russia. The leading proponent of these efforts was cytogeneticist and professor Mikhail Navashin. His book "The Astronomy Amateur's Telescope" went through several editions. Moscow artist Mikhail Shemyakin also played a prominent role, and under his leadership VAGO published the Amateur Telescopes series.

In Soviet times, an amateur could build a telescope practically for free, simply by joining a local club of telescope building enthusiasts, which existed in every big city. Well-equipped clubs had machines for making mirrors and accessories. Club members typically made 4- and 6-inch mirrors, and some even made large apertures up to 16 inches. Famous Among these clubs was the telescope construction club named after D. Maksutov, founded in 1973 by Leonid Sikoruk, a director from Novosibirsk. Its members adopted advanced telescope designs, including the Schmidt and Wright cameras, the Doll-Kirham and Ritchey-Chrétien cameras, and even the spectroheliograph. Sikoruk's book "Telescopes for Astronomy Lovers", published in 1982, remains popular to this day, and his documentary film "Telescopes" was broadcast on television throughout the Soviet Union.

In 1980, L. Sikoruk convinced the director of the Novosibirsk enterprise, which produced artillery and gun sights, to begin producing telescopes for astronomy enthusiasts, and this event became an important milestone for the promotion of Russian telescope construction. Bearing the TAL brand name, thousands of these instruments soon became widely available in stores. One or more of them found their way to every Russian school, astronomy club, and planetarium. Export of the TAL line of telescopes began in 1993, and the 6-inch Newton model was reviewed favorably in this magazine (SKY&Telescore December 1997, page 57).

Anatoly Sankovichis another enthusiast who has channeled his passion for telescopes into a commercial venture. Having manufactured numerous complex optical systems such as Wright-Schmidt cameras, Sankovich joined forces with other telescope builders in Moscow to launch Svema-Luxe http://www.telescope.newmail.ru/eng/eng.htm l The company now supplies the INTES manufacturing cooperative with parabolic primary mirrors with apertures up to 20 inches.

One can imagine that as the 20th century draws to a close, so too do the opportunities for new telescope optical designs. But in recent years, P. P. Argunov of Odessa and Yuri Klevtsov of Novosibirsk have invented a catadioptric telescope with fully spherical optics, which promises to be more cost-effective to manufacture than the Maksutov-Cassegrain, providing comparable quality. Novosibirsk Instrument-Making Plant http://www.npz.sol.ru/ recently added the 8-inch Klevtsov aperture to the TAL line of amateur telescopes, thereby combining individual ingenuity and state enterprise in the new Russia under construction.

A doubtful but hopeful future

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, VAGO lost its "all-Union" status and the activities of some of its branches ceased. A dark period began for astronomy. With rare exceptions, Russian hobbyists who wanted first-class telescopes had to make them with their own hands - although some of the telescope-building clubs survived, but the raw materials and supplies were no longer free. Under such unfavorable conditions, it would seem that amateur astronomy in Russia will slowly and for a long time fade away.

During the economic chaos that still prevails in our country, most Russians continue to struggle for a daily piece of bread, and have little money for hobbies. But despite these difficulties, we see many encouraging developments. Some former VAGO branches have survived as independent societies, and many new amateur groups have formed since 1995. The prices of ready-made telescopes and accessories, although very high, are no longer out of reach. Our growing ranks of skywatchers include one observer who has set a high standard for observational excellence. From his site in the North Caucasus, Timur Kryachko has so far discovered a dozen asteroids, one of which he discovered while serving in the Soviet Army. Kryachko monitors variable stars, hunts for supernovae, and sometimes oversees amateur dark-sky “expeditions” to the Caucasus and Crimea.

Thanks to the Internet, hobbyists from all over our vast country exchange messages and make connections. School-sponsored astronomy "Olympiads" also play an important role in growing the ranks of young astronomers (SKY&Telescore, March 2000, page 86). Local winners travel to Moscow to compete for overall recognition. Dobsons, joint observation trips, the Messier Marathon - everything that was foreign to us not too many years ago - is becoming more and more popular.

For the past five years the Moscow Astronomical Club, currently the largest amateur group in Russia, has sponsored an astronomy festival in Zvenigorod, 50 km west of Moscow http://astroclub.ru/astrofest

A handful of enthusiasts have also banded together to publish a monthly magazine, Stargazer, which is dedicated exclusively to amateur astronomy http://www.astronomy.ru/

It's time for astronomy and planetariums to flourish in Russia.

The British Royal Air Force's motto "through hardships to the stars" could of course be ours too.

"SKY&Telescore", September 2001, pp.66-73

There is probably not a single person on the entire planet who has not thought about the strange flickering dots in the sky that are visible at night. Why does the Moon go around the Earth? Astronomy studies all this and even more. What are planets, stars, comets, when will there be an eclipse and why do tides occur in the ocean - science answers these and many other questions. Let's understand its formation and significance for humanity.

Definition and structure of science

Astronomy is the science of the structure and origin of various cosmic bodies, celestial mechanics and the development of the universe. Its name comes from two ancient Greek words, the first of which means “star”, and the second - “establishment, custom”.

Astrophysics studies the composition and properties of celestial bodies. Its subsection is stellar astronomy.

Celestial mechanics answers questions about the motion and interaction of space objects.

Cosmogony deals with the origin and evolution of the universe.

Thus, today ordinary earth sciences, with the help of modern technology, can extend the field of research far beyond the boundaries of our planet.

Subject and tasks

In space, it turns out, there are a lot of different bodies and objects. All of them are studied and constitute, in fact, the subject of astronomy. Galaxies and stars, planets and meteors, comets and antimatter - all this is only a hundredth part of the questions that this discipline poses.

Recently, an amazing practical opportunity has arisen. Since then, astronautics (or astronautics) has proudly stood shoulder to shoulder with academic researchers.

Humanity has dreamed of this for a long time. The first known story is Somnium, written in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. And only in the twentieth century were people able to look at our planet from the outside and visit the Earth’s satellite - the Moon.

Topics in astronomy are not limited to just these problems. Next we will talk in more detail.

What techniques are used to solve problems? The first and most ancient of them is observation. The following features have only recently appeared. This is photography, the launch of space stations and artificial satellites.

Questions concerning the origin and evolution of the universe and individual objects cannot yet be sufficiently studied. Firstly, there is not enough accumulated material, and secondly, many bodies are too far away for accurate study.

Types of observations

At first, humanity could only boast of ordinary visual observation of the sky. But even this primitive method gave simply amazing results, which we will talk about a little later.

Astronomy and space are more connected today than ever. Objects are studied using the latest technology, which allows the development of many branches of this discipline. Let's get to know them.

Optical method. The oldest version of observation using the naked eye, with the participation of binoculars, telescopes, and telescopes. This also includes the recently invented photography.

The next section concerns the registration of infrared radiation in space. It is used to record invisible objects (for example, hidden behind gas clouds) or the composition of celestial bodies.

The importance of astronomy cannot be overestimated, because it answers one of the eternal questions: where did we come from?

The following techniques explore the universe for gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet radiation.

There are also techniques that do not involve electromagnetic radiation. In particular, one of them is based on the theory of the neutrino nucleus. The gravitational wave industry studies space on the propagation of these two actions.
Thus, the types of observations known at the present time have significantly expanded mankind’s capabilities in space exploration.

Let's look at the process of formation of this science.

The origin and first stages of the development of science

In ancient times, during the primitive communal system, people were just beginning to get acquainted with the world and identify phenomena. They tried to understand the change of day and night, the seasons of the year, the behavior of incomprehensible things such as thunder, lightning, and comets. What the Sun and Moon are also remained a mystery, so they were considered deities.
However, despite this, already in the heyday of the Sumerian kingdom, the priests in the ziggurats made quite complex calculations. They divided the visible luminaries into constellations, identified the “zodiacal belt” known today in them, and developed a lunar calendar consisting of thirteen months. They also discovered the “Metonian cycle”, although the Chinese did this a little earlier.

The Egyptians continued and deepened their study of celestial bodies. They have an absolutely amazing situation. The Nile River floods at the beginning of summer, just at this time it begins to appear on the horizon, which hid in the winter months in the sky of the other hemisphere.

In Egypt, they first began to divide the day into 24 hours. But at the beginning their week was ten days, that is, the month consisted of three decades.

However, ancient astronomy received its greatest development in China. Here they managed to almost accurately calculate the length of the year, could predict solar and lunar eclipses, and kept records of comets, sunspots and other unusual phenomena. At the end of the second millennium BC, the first observatories appeared.

Antiquity period

The history of astronomy in our understanding is impossible without Greek constellations and terms in celestial mechanics. Although at first the Hellenes were very mistaken, over time they were able to make fairly accurate observations. The mistake, for example, was that they considered Venus, appearing in the morning and evening, to be two different objects.

The first to pay special attention to this area of ​​knowledge were the Pythagoreans. They knew that the Earth is spherical in shape, and day and night alternate because it rotates around its axis.

Aristotle was able to calculate the circumference of our planet, although he was mistaken by a factor of two, but even such accuracy was high for that time. Hipparchus was able to calculate the length of the year and introduced geographical concepts such as latitude and longitude. Compiled tables of solar and lunar eclipses. From them it was possible to predict these phenomena with an accuracy of two hours. Our meteorologists should learn from him!

The last luminary of the ancient world was Claudius Ptolemy. The history of astronomy has preserved the name of this scientist forever. A most brilliant mistake that determined the development of mankind for a long time. He proved the hypothesis according to which the Earth is in and all celestial bodies revolve around it. Thanks to militant Christianity, which replaced the Roman world, many sciences were abandoned, such as astronomy too. No one was interested in what it was or what the circumference of the Earth was; they argued more about how many angels would fit into the eye of a needle. Therefore, the geocentric scheme of the world became the measure of truth for many centuries.

Indian astronomy

The Incas viewed the sky a little differently than other peoples. If we turn to the term, astronomy is the science of the movement and properties of celestial bodies. The Indians of this tribe first of all singled out and especially revered the “Great Heavenly River” - the Milky Way. On Earth, its continuation was Vilcanota, the main river near the city of Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire. It was believed that the Sun, having set in the west, sank to the bottom of this river and moved along it to the eastern part of the sky.

It is reliably known that the Incas identified the following planets - the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, and without telescopes they made observations that only Galileo could repeat with the help of optics.

Their observatory was twelve pillars, which were located on a hillock near the capital. With their help, the position of the Sun in the sky was determined and the change of seasons and months was recorded.

The Mayans, unlike the Incas, developed knowledge very deeply. The bulk of what astronomy studies today was known to them. They made a very precise calculation of the length of the year, dividing the month into two weeks of thirteen days. The beginning of the chronology was considered to be 3113 BC.

Thus, we see that in the Ancient World and among the “barbarian” tribes, as “civilized” Europeans considered them, the study of astronomy was at a very high level. Let's see what Europe could boast of after the fall of the ancient states.

Middle Ages

Thanks to the zeal of the Inquisition in the late Middle Ages and the weak development of the tribes in the early stages of this period, many sciences took a step back. If in the era of antiquity people knew that astronomy was studied, and many were interested in such information, then in the Middle Ages theology became more developed. Talking about the Earth being round and the Sun being in the center could get you burned at the stake. Such words were considered blasphemy, and people were called heretics.

The revival, oddly enough, came from the east through the Pyrenees. The Arabs brought to Catalonia knowledge preserved by their ancestors since the time of Alexander the Great.

In the fifteenth century, the Cardinal of Cusa expressed the opinion that the universe is infinite, and Ptolemy was mistaken. Such sayings were blasphemous, but very much ahead of their time. Therefore, they were considered nonsense.

But the revolution was made by Copernicus, who, before his death, decided to publish the research of his entire life. He proved that the Sun is in the center, and the Earth and other planets revolve around it.

Planets

These are celestial bodies that orbit in space. They got their name from the ancient Greek word for “wanderer.” Why is that? Because to ancient people they seemed like traveling stars. The rest stand in their usual places, but they move every day.

How are they different from other objects in the universe? Firstly, the planets are quite small. Their size allows them to clear their path of planetesimals and other debris, but it is not enough to start out like a star.

Secondly, due to their mass, they acquire a rounded shape, and due to certain processes they form a dense surface. Third, planets usually orbit in a specific system around a star or its remains.

Ancient people considered these celestial bodies to be “messengers” of the gods or semi-divines, of a lower rank than, for example, the Moon or the Sun.

And only Galileo Galilei, for the first time, using observations in the first telescopes, was able to conclude that in our system all bodies move in orbits around the Sun. For which he suffered from the Inquisition, which silenced him. But the matter was continued.

By the definition accepted by most today, only bodies with sufficient mass that orbit a star are considered planets. The rest is satellites, asteroids, etc. From the point of view of science, there are no loners in these ranks.

So, the time during which a planet makes a full circle in its orbit around a star is called a planetary year. The closest place on its path to the star is periastron, and the farthest is apoaster.

The second thing that is important to know about planets is that their axis is tilted relative to their orbit. Due to this, when the hemispheres rotate, they receive different amounts of light and radiation from the stars. This is how the seasons and time of day change, and climatic zones have also formed on Earth.

It is important that the planets, in addition to their path around the star (per year), also rotate around their axis. In this case, the complete circle is called a “day”.
And the last feature of such a celestial body is its clean orbit. For normal functioning, the planet must, along the way, collide with various smaller objects, destroy all “competitors” and travel in splendid isolation.

There are different planets in our solar system. Astronomy has eight of them in total. The first four belong to the “terrestrial group” - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars. The rest are divided into gas (Jupiter, Saturn) and ice (Uranus, Neptune) giants.

Stars

We see them every night in the sky. A black field dotted with shiny dots. They form groups called constellations. And yet it is not for nothing that an entire science is named in their honor - astronomy. What is a "star"?

Scientists say that with the naked eye, with a sufficiently good level of vision, a person can see three thousand celestial objects in each hemisphere.
They have long attracted humanity with their flickering and “unearthly” meaning of existence. Let's take a closer look.

So, a star is a massive lump of gas, a kind of cloud with a fairly high density. Thermonuclear reactions occur or have previously occurred inside it. The mass of such objects allows them to form systems around themselves.

When studying these cosmic bodies, scientists identified several classification methods. You've probably heard about "red dwarfs", "white giants" and other "residents" of the universe. So, today one of the most universal classifications is the Morgan-Keenan typology.

It involves dividing stars according to their size and emission spectrum. In descending order, the groups are named in the form of letters of the Latin alphabet: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. To help you understand it a little and find a starting point, the Sun, according to this classification, falls into group “G”.

Where do such giants come from? They are formed from the most common gases in the universe - hydrogen and helium, and due to gravitational compression they acquire their final shape and weight.

Our star is the Sun, and the closest one to us is Proxima Centauri. It is located in the system and is located from us at a distance of 270 thousand distances from the Earth to the Sun. And this is about 39 trillion kilometers.

In general, all stars are measured in accordance with the Sun (their mass, size, brightness in the spectrum). The distance to such objects is calculated in light years or parsecs. The latter is approximately 3.26 light years, or 30.85 trillion kilometers.

Astronomy enthusiasts should undoubtedly know and understand these numbers.
Stars, like everything else in our world, the universe, are born, develop and die, in their case, explode. According to the Harvard scale, they are divided along a spectrum from blue (young) to red (old). Our Sun is yellow, that is, “mature.”

There are also brown and white dwarfs, red giants, variable stars and many other subtypes. They differ in the level of content of different metals. After all, it is the combustion of various substances due to thermonuclear reactions that makes it possible to measure the spectrum of their radiation.

There are also names "nova", "supernova" and "hypernova". These concepts are not entirely reflected in terms. Stars are just old, mostly ending their existence with an explosion. And these words only mean that they were noticed only during the collapse; before that, they were not recorded at all even in the best telescopes.

When looking at the sky from Earth, clusters are clearly visible. Ancient people gave them names, composed legends about them, and placed their gods and heroes there. Today we know such names as Pleiades, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, which came to us from the ancient Greeks.

However, today scientists stand out. To put it simply, imagine that we see in the sky not one Sun, but two, three or even more. Thus, there are double, triple stars and clusters (where there are more stars).

Interesting facts

Due to various reasons, for example, distance from the star, a planet can “go” into outer space. In astronomy, this phenomenon is called an “orphan planet.” Although most scientists still insist that these are protostars.

An interesting feature of the starry sky is that it is not actually the same as we see it. Many objects exploded long ago and ceased to exist, but were so far away that we still see the light from the flash.

Recently, there has been a widespread fashion for searching for meteorites. How to determine what is in front of you: a stone or a celestial alien. Interesting astronomy answers this question.

First of all, a meteorite is denser and heavier than most materials of terrestrial origin. Due to its iron content, it has magnetic properties. Also, the surface of the celestial object will be melted, since during its fall it suffered a severe temperature load due to friction with the Earth’s atmosphere.

We examined the main points of such a science as astronomy. What are stars and planets, the history of the formation of the discipline and some fun facts you learned from the article.

According to experts, in our era the volume of scientific information about natural phenomena doubles every 10–12 years. And this, apparently, is not a simple registration of an interesting fact, but a reflection of the objective law of the development of society at its present stage. Consequently, in order to keep pace with progress, it is necessary to ensure the development of science with just such acceleration.

“In an era when the role of science as a direct productive force is increasingly manifested,” said General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee L. I. Brezhnev at the 24th Congress of the CPSU, “the main thing is no longer its individual achievements, no matter how brilliant they may be, but high scientific and technical level of all production" [Materials of the XXIV Congress of the CPSU. M., 1971, p. 56].

Without science, such fundamental problems facing modern humanity as space exploration, environmental conservation, development and creation of new energy sources, etc. cannot be successfully solved.

Today, the progress of science has become one of the leading factors determining the fate of all mankind. In particular, in our country, science has become one of the main sources of increasing the material standard of living of the people; it is exerting an increasing influence on all aspects of the life of Soviet people.

In the era of the scientific and technological revolution, the role of fundamental scientific research - the study of the most profound, comprehensive, fundamental laws of the world around us - has increased immeasurably.

It is fundamental research that ultimately causes the most significant revolutionary changes in technology and production.

“We know very well,” General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee L.I. Brezhnev said in the Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the XXV Party Congress, “that the full flow of scientific and technological progress will dry up if it is not constantly fed by fundamental research” [Materials of the XXV CPSU Congress. M., 1976, p. 48].

Science has already comprehended much in the study of the fundamental properties of the universe, but the Universe is infinitely diverse, and, as one ancient sage rightly noted, the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater the line of contact with the unknown.

But in order to penetrate into this unknown today at the current level of our knowledge, it is necessary to study matter in its extreme states.

Huge temperatures of tens and hundreds of millions of degrees. Enormous pressures of tens and hundreds of millions of atmospheres. Monstrous densities of hundreds of millions and billions of tons per cubic centimeter. Gigantic energies, comparable to the energy of the explosion of a thermonuclear charge with a mass equal to tens of thousands of solar masses. Space vacuum...

These are the physical conditions whose study is necessary for the progress of modern science. However, it is, of course, impossible to reproduce such conditions in earthly laboratories.

And yet, a laboratory where such unusual states of matter are realized exists. This is an infinitely diverse laboratory of the Universe.

“It should be recognized,” emphasizes the famous theoretical physicist R. Dicke, that in principle both the physicist and his instruments are so firmly connected with the rest of the Universe, so organically immersed in it, that even their mental separation is impossible.”

According to the figurative expression of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences N.V. Mitskevich, modern physicists, in order to further penetrate into the secrets of nature, needed to “place” a star, a galaxy and even the Universe in their laboratories.

It is these circumstances that explain the ever-increasing interest in the study of the Universe, especially the various physical processes in space.

Ideas about the Universe have always been the most important component of the scientific picture of the world. It is no coincidence that for many centuries the science of the Universe - astronomy has been the “leader” of natural science. In particular, it was astronomical observations that served as the initial foundation for the discovery of the laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation, i.e., for building the foundations of classical physics.

Subsequently, physics came to the forefront, creating such fundamental theories that are of fundamental importance for understanding the world around us, such as quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

In our time, the importance of astrophysical research has increased. If earlier this area of ​​astronomy, which deals with the study of the physical nature of phenomena occurring in the distant and inaccessible depths of space, seemed the most abstract and divorced from real life, today it is precisely this area that has acquired the greatest practical interest.

If we count the fundamental discoveries made over the past decades in various fields of science, we will find that astrophysics occupies one of the first places in modern natural science in terms of this indicator.

Thanks to the development of fundamentally new means of studying cosmic phenomena and outstanding discoveries made in the depths of space, thanks to the unlimited opportunity to draw unique information from the infinitely diverse natural laboratory of the Universe, a new era in the development of natural science is now apparently dawning, an era in which astrophysics will take the leading role. position.

“Science has made significant progress in the study of the Universe, including stars, galactic nuclei, processes occurring on the Sun, cosmic rays,” notes Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician V. A. Kotelnikov. Fundamental discoveries of modern astrophysics related to the possibilities of observation in new ranges of electromagnetic waves have clarified some aspects of the evolution of stars and galaxies. Universe.

Further development of astronomical observations both from the surface of the Earth and with the help of spacecraft and artificial satellites will make it possible to obtain increasingly complete information about many phenomena in the chain of cosmic evolution, about mysterious astrophysical objects.”

The Universe is part of the world

Natural science does not study all matter, but only certain aspects of it, which are determined by the nature of human activity. Now we will have to return to this issue again in connection with the need to find out what exactly we should understand by the term “Universe”.

Let's start with the fact that in popular science and scientific literature, expressions like “the beginning of the Universe”, “the boundaries of the Universe”, “when the Universe did not exist” are constantly encountered...

Such expressions cause natural bewilderment: if the Universe had a beginning, therefore it is not eternal? But in this case, what to do with one of the main provisions of materialism about the eternity of the Universe?

To better understand this, let's try to imagine a conversation between two imaginary characters - an astronomy lover and a Philosopher dealing with methodological problems of the science of the Universe.

Amateur. Just a few years ago, while reading popular science literature on astronomy, I clearly understood what was meant by the term “Universe”. But lately I've been completely confused. Maybe now the Universe is understood as something else?

Philosopher. What do you think was understood by the Universe before?

Amateur. If I'm not mistaken, it has always been believed that the Universe is “everything that exists.”

Philosopher. However, the term “existence” is quite ambiguous. And therefore, it is necessary to clarify what kind of existence we are talking about.

Amateur. Well, in general, about everything that exists in the Universe.

Philosopher. Don't you think, however, that this creates a vicious circle: the “Universe” is what exists in the “Universe”?

Amateur. Yes, indeed...

Philosopher. And it probably hardly makes sense to consider as existing something about the existence of which we have no information.

Amateur. I understand... Then, obviously, what can be directly observed with the help of modern means of scientific research should be considered existing.

Philosopher. This is already something more definite. But before we accept your proposal, let's try to analyze it first. If we agree with your definition, then in the relatively recent past, by the Universe we should have understood the “stellar Universe”, i.e. our Galaxy. And now that we know other galaxies, part of the “Big Universe”, the Metagalaxy.

Amateur. Well... Apparently, that's how it is.

Philosopher. Perhaps everything would be fine if not for one “but”. Unfortunately, both physics and astronomy have already convinced us that we are observing an awn - a very unreliable criterion of existence.

Amateur. I don't quite understand what you mean.

Philosopher. I can explain. As is known, due to the finite speed of propagation of electromagnetic waves, we observe all space objects with a delay, the more significant the further away they are. Let's say the well-known Polar Star is located at a distance of about 500 light years - which means we see it as it was about five centuries ago. Under such conditions, can we unconditionally assert that it exists, based on the fact that we observe it today? It probably exists, since within 500 light-years it is unlikely that anything drastic can happen to a star of this type. And yet this is only a possibility. But there are non-stationary space objects where deep qualitative changes occur in relatively short periods of time, literally within a few years? What to do with them? Even more complex situations are possible. In a word, observability as a criterion of existence for astronomy, in my opinion, is of little use.

I think it would be more correct to proceed from another idea, according to which the entire variety of physical conditions and phenomena allowed by the basic physical theories is realized in the Universe...

Amateur: But since our knowledge about the world around us develops, and with it the basic physical theories, this automatically means that different Universes correspond to different levels of scientific development.

Philosopher. I think the Universe should be viewed not as a holistic aspect of everything that exists, but in relation to a certain level of human practice. In other words, the Universe is that area of ​​processes and phenomena that is highlighted by modern scientific means, observational and theoretical.

Amateur: So it really is like that? There may be several Universes! Strange situation.

Philosopher. Nothing strange. Each cosmological theory recreates the Universe “in its own way”, builds its own model. And the “Universes” of different theories do not coincide with each other. One should not just lose sight of the fact that any such “theoretical” Universe will never become a completely completed “image” of the real world. Further research will inevitably complement and deepen it...

By the way, if from this point of view you look at the successive teachings about the world, then it will become absolutely clear that although all these teachings claimed to describe the world as a whole, in reality each of them related only to a limited area of ​​the Universe, the boundaries of which during the transition from one teaching to another gradually expanded.

Thus, the system of the world of Aristotle - Ptolemy correctly reflected some of the features of the Earth as a celestial body: that the Earth is a sphere, that everything gravitates towards its center... Thus, this was the doctrine of the Earth itself.

The Copernican world system actually described the structure of the Solar system, and Herschel’s world system described the structure of our Galaxy...

The universe is expanding

What are the main features of modern ideas about the Universe?

The central star of our planetary system, the Sun, is part of a giant star island - the galaxy. Our Galaxy has a spiral structure and consists of 150 billion stars. Its diameter reaches 100 thousand light years.

There are other star islands outside our Galaxy. The closest ones together with it form the so-called Local system. In particular, it includes the famous galaxy in the constellation Andromeda, the distance to which is about 2 million light years.

In the region of the world that is accessible to modern astronomical observations, there are billions of galaxies. Their totality is called the Metagalaxy.

Even at the beginning of this century, science was dominated by the idea that the Universe is stationary and, in its main features, does not change over time.

However, in 1922, the talented Soviet mathematician A. A. Friedman (1888–1925) discovered that the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describe the behavior of the Universe, do not have stationary solutions.

From Friedman's work it followed that the Universe must either expand, contract, or pulsate. This theoretical conclusion was later confirmed by astronomical observations, which revealed a red shift of spectral lines in the spectra of galaxies. As is known, a similar phenomenon occurs in cases when the source of wave oscillations moves away from the observer (Doppler effect).

We will not now go into the history of the controversy surrounding the interpretation of the red shift in the spectra of galaxies. In any case, by now the Doppler nature of this phenomenon can be considered fairly reliably established. This means that all galaxies are scattering in different directions, and the further a particular galaxy is from us, the faster it is moving away. There is a stretching of space that does not have a single center, and such that the rate of increase in the distance between any two points is proportional to this distance.

Thus, we live in an expanding universe.

Knowing the speed at which galaxies are moving away, we can mentally reverse the expansion pattern, and then we will come to the fundamental conclusion that 15–18 billion years ago the Universe was in a different state than in our era. There were no stars, no galaxies, or other isolated space objects. There was only a clot of super-dense hot plasma.

The explosive disintegration and expansion of this clot ultimately led to the emergence of all the diversity of objects and physical conditions that we observe in the Universe in our era.

Thus, the Universe changes over time.

Its past is not identical to its present, and its present is not identical to its future.

The idea that extremely slow and smooth processes predominate in the Universe has also undergone significant revision. As it became clear in recent decades, primarily thanks to the research of Soviet astronomers, many phases of the development of matter in space are sharply non-stationary and have the character of an explosion, disintegration, and dissipation. And such nonstationarity manifests itself in cosmic phenomena of various scales, at different levels of the existence of matter.

As Academician V.A. Ambartsumyan noted, the most important consequence of these discoveries was the transformation of astrophysics into an evolutionary science. If earlier astrophysics was mainly limited to the study of the physical properties of various cosmic objects, characterizing mainly their current state, now the study of their prehistory, origin and development, qualitative transformations, transitions of matter from one form to another has come to the fore.

Past and present

Thus, the task arises of clarifying the past states of space objects and the successive stages of their development. The task is extremely difficult, considering that we are talking about enormous periods of time of millions and billions of years and about conditions that could undergo dramatic changes in our era.

However, the history of natural science shows that if science faces certain problems, then there are ways to solve them. In particular, modern astrophysics has very real possibilities of penetrating into the past.

Generally speaking, in order to reveal the patterns of development of any object of interest to us, it is necessary to study it in movement, where movement is understood in a broad sense as any change.

There is an old legend about a king who once gave his wise men a difficult task. Having invited them to the palace, he pointed out to them a large stone ball lying in the middle of the courtyard and asked them to determine what was inside it. One after another, the wise men tried to solve the difficult problem. For days on end they sat alone with the ball, peering intently at it and trying to penetrate inside the stone with the power of thought. And one after another they left, hanging their heads, having failed to complete the task. This continued until a truly wise man was found among the sages. He ordered a fire to be built under the mysterious ball and heated it until the hot stone cracked and the ball broke into two halves. And then everyone saw that there was nothing inside the ball except stone...

If the object of study were motionless, if nothing happened to it, if there were no changes in it, then it would be impossible to learn anything reliable about it. A truly scientific investigation is based on the study of real changes occurring in nature.

Of course, you can also create a backstory for a “fixed” object. But we must compose them, because the realism of such hypotheses will be revealed only if we manage to check to what extent they predict and explain the changes that are taking place.

Imagine that in front of you is a finished, plastered, brand new building. And you look at it from the outside and know absolutely nothing about what it is built from and in what way. In such a situation, you can build any hypotheses: let's say that it is made of bricks, or pieces of granite, or panels, or blocks, and any of these hypotheses will seem equally plausible.

A completely different situation would have arisen if we had caught the period when the building was still being erected. Watching the construction site, we... not only would they be able to develop completely realistic hypotheses, but also test their validity with further observations.

Unfortunately, astronomers, as a rule, have to deal with almost “stationary” objects. These are, for example, the majority of stars and galaxies, which develop so slowly that for humanity, with its relatively short (from the point of view of cosmic scales) life scale, they practically remain unchanged. Even a whole century in the history of such an object is the same as a second in our everyday life. Observing similar objects for many decades in a row, we still get the same “instant” photograph. Is there a way out of this real predicament?

Let's look at our example with a built house.

Is it still possible to find out how it was built? To do this, you should take a “tour” around the city and find other exactly the same houses, but at different stages of construction. And even if our excursion is made on a Sunday, when everything is “still,” mentally arranging the discovered houses one after another according to “stages of completion,” we will get an “age series” that will help us imagine all the successive stages of building a house.

Scientists do much the same in their difficult search for the past of stars and galaxies. The world of these space objects is extremely diverse. And this diversity is explained not only by the existence of many types of similar cosmic objects, but also by the fact that different stars and galaxies may currently be at different stages of their evolution.

In order to judge the paths of development of celestial bodies, it is necessary to divide them into classes of objects of the same type and within each such class to create an “age series”. Such a series may well replace a series of successive states in time of the same object of interest to us.

A similar method, which can be called the “method of comparison,” is used not only in astronomy, but also in many other areas of modern natural science.

However, it often happens that the object we are interested in is known to us in a single copy. These are, for example, our planetary system or the Metagalaxy. There is nothing to compare them with. But even in this case, there are opportunities to find out their background. Even V.I. Lenin noted that in the foundation of the building of matter itself one can “assume the existence of an ability similar to sensation” [Lenin V.I. Materialism and empirio-criticism. collection cit., vol. 18, p. 40] that all matter has a property essentially related to sensation, the property of reflection.

Nowadays, this property of matter - to store traces of previous states - has found practical application.

It is enough to recall at least the “memory” of electronic computers and cybernetic devices.

So, any matter can have “memory”.

From this point of view, all the patterns of the world around you can be divided into two large groups - patterns that are determined by the basic, fundamental laws of nature, and patterns that gradually emerge in the process of development of a particular material system.

Obviously, patterns of the first type do not depend on history - they are always the same, and their manifestations are determined by specific conditions. Let's say that Kepler's laws operate in the solar system, regardless of the paths of its formation. Consequently, such patterns by themselves cannot tell us anything about the history of a given system.

As for the patterns of the second type, they directly depend on the course of evolution and therefore can tell a lot about the past. In other words, the current state of many material systems quite often contains certain information about their prehistory.

But if matter is capable of storing “traces” of the past, then this means: the main “key” to understanding the past of cosmic objects lies, first of all, in a deep study of their current states.

Here a comparison with the work of a detective inevitably arises. Here he arrives at the crime scene. It happened, the criminal disappeared. Now it is necessary to restore what happened a few hours ago: without this, the attacker will not be caught. There are no living witnesses. And it would seem that the task is hopeless. However, there are other witnesses - objects, things. Although they are dead, they are by no means silent. As a result of the crime, something has changed in the state of the environment: no matter how sophisticated the criminal, he will almost inevitably leave some traces. And from these sometimes barely discernible, seemingly meaningless traces, an experienced detective will be able to reconstruct the picture of what happened.

Similar problems must be solved by a scientist interested in the past state of certain objects. By the way, we have already used a similar method when we tried to reconstruct the past of the Universe using the picture of the modern movement of galaxies.

Let us consider, as an example, the problem of the origin of the solar system. Science has factual data only about its current state. The solution, obviously, is to look for a reflection of the past in the picture of the planetary family of the Sun that exists today. This approach limits the range of possible hypotheses - after all, not every path of development could lead the Solar system to its modern form...

What are the patterns in the structure of the Solar system that could be classified as the second type, that is, patterns that depend on prehistory?

These are, first of all, the laws of planetary movements. All planets revolve around the Sun in the same direction and almost in the same plane, and their orbits differ little from circles. Meanwhile, according to the laws of mechanics, the rotation of celestial bodies under the influence of gravitational forces around a massive central core should occur in different directions, in different planes and in elongated, elliptical orbits. Movement in circles in one direction and even in one plane is a rare special case, and the probability that it will occur, for example, with a random association of celestial bodies that are not related to each other, is practically zero.

This circumstance indicates that the family of the Sun was formed in some single process, during which the observed features of planetary movements were formed.

This is also evidenced by the division of the planets of the solar system into two groups that differ in their properties. One of them consists of the four planets closest to the Sun - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

They are relatively small in size and consist mainly of heavy chemical elements. The second group includes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These are giant planets, consisting mainly of hydrogen and its compounds and helium.

Thus, it is possible to seriously consider only those cosmogonic hypotheses that not only describe how matter from a preplanetary state was formed into planets, but also show how the modern patterns of the Solar system developed in this process.

When it comes to studying the Universe, scientists have another opportunity - the possibility of directly observing the previous stages of the development of space objects.

In ordinary life, we see everything that happens at the very moment when it happens in reality. And even when, while in Moscow, we watch a television program from distant Vladivostok, which is broadcast through an artificial Earth satellite, the events in the Far Eastern studio and on the screen occur virtually simultaneously. This is understandable if we remember that electromagnetic waves propagate at a colossal speed of about 300,000 km/s. This speed allows them to instantly cover any earthly distance.

Cosmic distances are another matter. Already from Lupa - the nearest celestial body - the light travels to us for more than a second, and from the Sun - eight minutes and eighteen seconds. In order to travel the distance from the Sun to the farthest planet in the solar system, Pluto, a light wave takes five and a half hours, and it will reach the nearest star Proxima Centauri only after four years and four months.

Consequently, we see the Moon as it was a second ago, the Sun - 8 minutes 18 seconds late, and Proxima Centauri - 4 years and 4 months late.

Thus, by observing the sky, we directly look into the past of the Universe. And the further away this or that object is, the more distant times we penetrate.

If, say, the well-known Polar Star today ceased to exist altogether, then we, being on Earth, would continue to see this virtually non-existent star for another 500 years - exactly the period that light rays need to overcome the enormous the distance separating the North Star from the Earth.

Thus, every star, every galaxy that we see is one of the living pages of the history of the Universe.

Modern means of astronomical research make it possible to observe objects located at distances of up to 10–12 billion light leagues.

This means that we observe objects corresponding to these distances as they were 10–12 billion years ago.

Moreover, in principle, it is possible to obtain direct information about the earliest stages of the existence of the Universe. From the theory of the expanding Universe it follows that several hundred thousand years after the start of expansion, the density of the medium decreased so much that electromagnetic radiation was able to propagate freely in space.

This “fossil”, relict radiation has survived into our era and is now reliably recorded by radio telescopes. The study of its properties, in particular, showed that the initial substance had a very high temperature - it was hot plasma.

CMB radiation gives us direct information about a period that was several hundred thousand years distant from the beginning of the expansion.

Modern fundamental physical theories give us complete reliable data, right up to an even earlier moment when the expanding clump had nuclear density. This moment was no more than one second from the beginning of the expansion.

Thus, we already have fairly reliable information about the period of time, the duration of which is 99.99 times the entire history of the Metagalaxy...

Of course, any extrapolation, that is, the extension of our knowledge into the past or future of the Universe, inevitably entails a certain amount of uncertainty. And the further we go into the past or future, the greater this uncertainty. Although, as science develops, it is steadily decreasing.

There is a fundamental possibility of obtaining direct information about the very first moments of the expansion of the Universe.

Relic neutrinos can bring us information up to a moment that is only 0.3 seconds from the beginning of the expansion. At an even earlier stage, the density of the substance was so great that it was impenetrable even to neutrinos.

So-called gravitational waves could perhaps tell about this stage.

So far, we are not able to register relic neutrinos and gravitational waves. But this does not change the essence of the matter. Over time, methods for recording these radiations will be developed, and researchers of the Universe will have the opportunity to obtain information about the initial stage of its existence.

The inevitability of an increasingly strange world

With each new fundamental discovery, the world appeared before the gaze of man more and more strange and unusual, first from the point of view of everyday visual ideas about it, ordinary common sense, and with the further development of science - and from the point of view of the currently dominant scientific representations.

“It is the progress of fundamental knowledge,” said the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician A. ChP, from the rostrum of the 25th Congress of the CPSU. Aleksandrov, “changes seemingly established and unshakable points of view in science, opens new areas in science and technology... opens up the possibility of using completely new, often unexpected phenomena in areas that had absolutely nothing to do with the original field of research.”

Noting the fact that the properties of the real world, discovered in the process of scientific research, may conflict with our usual ideas about it, the outstanding physicist of the 20th century Max Born (1882–1970) emphasized that the decisive factor in the development of natural science is “the need for man to recognize the external the real world... existing independently of a person and his ability to go against his feelings where it is necessary to maintain a given belief.”

Many great scientific discoveries are based on the scientist's ability to abstract himself from his everyday experience and the hypnosis of visual representations. The fact is that one of the characteristic features of the world of phenomena studied by modern natural science is that these phenomena are becoming less and less visual.

At one time, some philosophers believed: that which cannot be visually imagined, say a world closed in itself, cannot exist. Awareness of the fact that the world of “strange”, outlandish phenomena really exists and is cognizable by science helps to free oneself from such a primitive, incorrect approach to understanding nature and thereby contributes to the progress of natural science.

Much of what modern physics and astrophysics study cannot be visualized.

But you can understand! And this is the main thing. For example, it is completely impossible to imagine spaces with complex geometry. But their properties can be understood and described using the appropriate mathematical apparatus.

At the same time, this does not mean at all that modern physicists and astronomers do not use visual representations at all in the process of scientific research. Visual images are necessary both during scientific research and when explaining complex phenomena. Flo, these images cannot be identified with the real world itself: they are conditional, auxiliary in nature.

Copernicus was one of the first to overcome the hypnosis of visual representations of the world around him and to discern behind the visible movements of the celestial bodies their true movements in cosmic space.

But a number of subsequent steps, which ultimately led to the construction of a picture of the world of classical physics, were also associated with overcoming habitual ideas. By discovering his “three laws,” Kepler overcame the widespread belief at that time about the circular nature of planetary orbits and the movement of planets with constant angular velocities.

In formulating his “principle of inertia,” Galileo had to overcome the idea that uniform rectilinear motion of a body occurs under the influence of a constant force.

Newton discovered the law of gravity contrary to the belief that the planets were “pushed” by some unknown mysterious forces...

And yet, as long as physics was limited to the study of such processes with which man encounters more or less directly, its conclusions did not come into any particular contradiction with our everyday experience.

When, at the beginning of the 20th century, physics invaded the world of microphenomena and began to deeply comprehend physical processes on a cosmic scale, it discovered a number of facts, circumstances and patterns that turned out to be very strange and unusual not only from the point of view of ordinary common sense, but also from the standpoint of everything previous classical natural science.

These oddities are reflected primarily in the two greatest theories of our century - quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

The first of them approved completely new ideas about the properties of the smallest particles of matter - elementary particles. It turned out, for example, that there is no fundamental difference between a particle and a wave, between matter and radiation. In some situations, particles exhibit their corpuscular properties, in others - wave properties. Material particles can turn into radiation, and portions of radiation - photons - into material particles.

One of the most striking conclusions of quantum physics, contradicting both visual ideas about the world and the foundations of classical physics, was the so-called uncertainty principle, which was mentioned in one of the previous chapters. It turned out that it is impossible by any means to simultaneously accurately measure the speed and position of a microparticle in space. This meant that microparticles did not have trajectories of movement in the usual sense, but they were something like a cloud smeared in space.

Even more unusual were the conclusions of the theory of relativity. In particular, it turned out that many physical quantities that seemed absolute and unchanging, for example, the mass of a volume, lengths of segments, time intervals, are in fact relative, depending on the nature of the movement of the system in which certain physical phenomena occur .

Thus, it turned out that the mass of a body increases with increasing speed. And therefore, the mass of, say, a proton or neutron, flying at a speed close to the speed of light, can, in principle, exceed the mass of the Earth, the Sun, and even the mass of our star system - the Galaxy.

But all these were only the very first steps into that amazing, strange world of science, which in the second half of the 20th century is unfolding more and more rapidly before us.

In the depths of the microworld

One of the most fundamental areas of modern natural science is the physics of the microworld, which studies the structure of matter at the level of microprocesses - atoms, atomic nuclei and elementary particles.

Over the past decades, this area of ​​science has progressed rapidly. Just twenty years ago, physicists knew only about a dozen elementary particles, and it seemed that all the objects in the world around us were made of these particles. But then, thanks to the commissioning of giant accelerators and the use of electronic computing technology, many new particles were discovered, now their number is measured in hundreds.

However, the stagnation turned out to be temporary, and in recent years the situation has changed in a very significant way.

A special field of elementary particle physics - the so-called new particles - has developed. So-called psi particles have been discovered, which have very interesting properties.

Back in 1964, theoretical physicists M. Gell-Mann and G. Zweig, based on some theoretical considerations, put forward a bold and original idea about special fundamental particles, quarks. According to this idea, there are three quarks with fractional electric charges and three corresponding antiquarks. Protons, neutrons, hyperons, mesons, their antiparticles, as well as some other elementary particles can be built from quarks and antiquarks.

From a theoretical point of view, the quark hypothesis turned out to be very interesting and promising. In any case, in the world of elementary particles everything happens exactly as if quarks really existed.

From 1964 to 1970, active searches for quarks were undertaken in many laboratories around the world. They were searched for in particle accelerators, in cosmic rays, and even in samples of lunar soil. However, it was never possible to detect quarks in a free state. True, from time to time there are reports in the press that these particles have finally been discovered, but further research does not confirm such reports.

In connection with this, there was some cooling towards the quark hypothesis. And at the same time, without quarks it would be very difficult to explain many properties of elementary particles. Therefore, despite everything, the quark hypothesis continued to develop. As a result, theorists came to the conclusion that there must be another fourth quark, the so-called C quark, with its own antiquarian.

Among other physical characteristics of this quark there is a new, so-called quantum number, called “charm” or “charm”.

But if there is a fourth quark, then the particles that contain it must also exist. It is one of these particles, the JPS meson, that was discovered in November 1974.

There is an assumption that the JPS meson is a kind of atom-like system, which consists of a C quark and its antiquark. This system was called "charmonium".

If this assumption is true, then the JPS meson apparently represents something other than one of the possible energy levels of charmonium.

It is also possible that in nature there are formations consisting of combinations of “old” and “new” quarks. At first, theorists tried to “construct” such objects, and at the end of 1976, reports appeared about the discovery of charmed mesons and a charmed baryon. It is interesting to note that the JPS meson turned out to be the heaviest meson among all known to modern physics. At the same time, the life expectancy of the JPS meson is also very long. It is about 10~20 s. This is about a thousand times longer than the lifetime of other heavy particles. And in 1977, the upsilon particle was discovered, predicted by theory as a combination of the sixth quark and an antiquark. Its mass is equal to five times the mass of a proton. The fact that psi particles turned out to be relatively long-lived suggests that, perhaps, in nature there is some kind of prohibition rule still unknown to us that vetoes the rapid decay of the J-psi meson and other similar particles.

The discovery of psi particles served as very important evidence in favor of the quark hypothesis and made us think again about why these objects cannot be detected experimentally.

To explain the situation that arose, an interesting idea of ​​so-called quark confinement was proposed.

The point is that, perhaps, in general there are particles in nature, including quarks, which in principle cannot be separated from each other and isolated in their pure form. According to this idea, the forces that bind two quarks together may not be of an electromagnetic nature, but of some other nature. It is possible that by their nature they resemble an infinitely narrow, elastic, as if “rubber” tube. Such an elastic tubular connection does not allow one quark to be torn off from another - “stretching” under external influence, it then contracts and returns the quark to its place. Thus, the possibility cannot be excluded that quarks represent a special type of formations that can only exist in aggregate and which are fundamentally impossible to separate. It is also possible that further development of elementary particle physics will show that, in addition to the four quarks currently appearing, there are others, heavier ones. Perhaps the answer to this question will be obtained in the very near future. The theory of elementary particles, along with astrophysics, has always played an important role in the formation of new ideas about the phenomena of the world around us. In particular, the modern theory of elementary particles not only introduces us to new objects, but as it develops it leads us into the depths of an “ever stranger world.” One of the very curious objects of the “strange world” of modern microphysics are the so-called superluminal particles, or tachyons.

Faster than light

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, which is one of the fundamental foundations of modern natural science, the transmission speed of any physical interactions cannot exceed the speed of light.

However, it can be assumed that, along with the world of subluminal interactions, there is a world of superluminal speeds that does not intersect with it anywhere, in which the speed of light is not the upper, but the lower limit of the speed of physical processes. Such an assumption, in principle, not only does not contradict the essence of the theory of relativity, but, on the contrary, makes this theory more symmetrical and internally consistent, generalizing it to the world lying behind the light barrier.

By the way, this is exactly the case when the self-development of a theory, arising from its internal logic, leads to new conclusions.

Of course, the validity of the tachyon hypothesis can only be proven by experiment, but the naturalness of the theoretical generalization in question makes a strong impression.

If tachyons really existed, they would be the third type of particle known to us. The first of these consists of “sub-light” particles, which under no circumstances can reach exactly the speed of light. These include almost all elementary particles known to us. The second type is particles moving exactly at the speed of light. These include photons - portions of light - and neutrinos. Tachyons would be particles that always have superluminal speeds.

The question arises: is the tachyon hypothesis physically meaningless?

The whole point is that a relationship or process that is impossible in the range of phenomena familiar to us can, in principle, be realized in another area of ​​phenomena. In other words, our ideas about the possible and the impossible are relative. Only those conclusions of a theory that conflict with one or another fundamental law of nature in the area where this law has been sufficiently well tested can be considered physically meaningless. The tachyon hypothesis does not enter into such contradictions. The world of tachyons does not intersect anywhere with our sub-light world. The three types of particles that were mentioned have the following property: particles of one type cannot, under any interactions known to us, transform into particles of another type. Although at a deeper level, not yet studied by modern physics, this may not be the case.

True, so far no experimental indications of the possibility of the existence of tachyons have been obtained. But perhaps this is due to the fact that the corresponding experiments did not take into account some properties of these hypothetical particles still unknown to us. One interesting possibility is to try to detect tachyons using so-called Cherenkov radiation (a spoof of the Soviet physicist Cherenkov). The theory states that when moving in a vacuum, superluminal particles should emit electromagnetic waves, although such radiation would be very difficult to detect.

The physics of the microworld is especially instructive because in the process of its development a lot of unexpected concepts and images arise that shake the usual foundations. This clearly and convincingly demonstrates the illegality of any absolutization of scientific knowledge; physics as a science will never end.

The development of the theory of elementary particles leads us to more and more outlandish phenomena, further and further from the usual, visual concepts. This theory is gradually acquiring more complex mathematical and other images that have no analogies in the world that directly surrounds us.

At the same time, despite the abundance of experimental data, a unified theory of elementary particles does not yet exist. Does this mean that modern microphysics needs some fundamentally new, perhaps “crazy ideas”?

There is still much that is incomprehensible in the information that we have today about the processes of the microworld. It is possible that through the efforts of theorists, difficulties will be overcome on the basis of existing ideas. But completely new ideas, including very unusual ones, may be required.

This is the opinion of the majority of specialists working in this area of ​​physical science.

Amazing Universe

Thus, when science moved from the study of ordinary macroscopic phenomena surrounding us to the study of microprocesses, it encountered a world of unusual, strange phenomena.

Therefore, one could expect that when a leap is made in the opposite direction - from the physics of the macrocosm to the physics of the megacosmos, which is characterized by colossal distances, huge periods of time and gigantic masses of matter, then we will encounter no less strange and outlandish phenomena.

And so it happened! Astrophysics of the 20th century, studying the Universe, brought a number of unexpected discoveries that clearly do not fit into the framework of traditional ideas about the universe and produce at first glance the impression of something unusual, incredible, and inexplicable from the standpoint of common sense.

We have already talked about the discovery of the expansion of the Universe.

The study of its geometric properties led to no less surprising results.

We will not now touch upon the full dramatic events and sharp turns of the history of the study of this problem. A truly scientific formulation of the question about the geometry of the space of the Universe, and in particular about its finitude or infinity, became possible only at the beginning of the 20th century, when A. Einstein created the general theory of relativity.

One of the main conclusions of this theory is that the geometric properties of space depend on the distribution of matter. Any mass bends the surrounding space, and this curvature is stronger, the larger the mass.

Einstein explained the essence of the general theory of relativity something like this. If all matter suddenly disappeared from the world, then from the point of view of classical physics, space and time would be preserved. From the point of view of the general theory of relativity, with the disappearance of matter, space and time would disappear.

Thus, there is no absolute Newtonian space and absolute time independent of matter: space and time are only forms of its existence.

Since we live in a world filled with various cosmic objects - stars, nebulae, galaxies, we live in curved, or, as mathematicians say, non-Euclidean space.

In ordinary life, we do not notice this, since in Earth’s conditions we are dealing with relatively small masses and insignificant distances. It is for this reason that we are completely satisfied with ordinary Euclidean geometry. In earthly conditions it is a sufficient approximation to reality. However, on a cosmic scale, the curvature of space becomes significant, and it can no longer be taken into account. This is especially important for elucidating the geometric properties of the Universe. In particular, it turned out that in a curved world the unlimitedness and infinity of space are not the same thing. Unlimited space is the absence of boundaries. But it turns out that unlimited space can be finite, closed in itself, and infinite.

For clarity, let us give as an analogy a spherical surface, the surface of a ball of finite radius.

And let’s imagine some hypothetical two-dimensional creature, say an infinitely flat ant, living on this surface and not even suspecting that some third dimension exists.

Wherever this ant crawls, it will never reach the edge of its spherical world. And in this sense, the spherical surface is unlimited.

But since its radius is finite, its area is also finite - this is finite space.

The unlimited nature of the material world is beyond doubt. If we take the positions of materialism and atheism, we must admit that the material world cannot have boundaries. The presence of boundaries would mean that there is something immaterial behind them. In other words, we would come to the ideal, to religion.

Thus, the question of the unlimited nature of the material world is a fundamental ideological question,

However, the unlimited world, as we already know, can be either finite or infinite. And the question of what it really is cannot be resolved from philosophical considerations alone; it can only be resolved by studying reality.

It is not difficult to guess that the finiteness or infinity of the space of the Universe depends on its curvature, and the curvature, in turn, is determined by the amount of matter, its mass.

Let us mentally collect all the matter of the Universe and “spread” it evenly throughout space. And let's see what mass is in one cubic meter, i.e. we will determine the average density.

The theory of relativity provides a clear criterion: if the average density is not more than nine protons - the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, space is open and infinite; if ten or more protons, closed and finite.

What does modern astrophysics tell us about the average density of matter in the Universe? There are different ways to define it, and they lead to different results. But in all cases the density is below critical. Thus, from the point of view of modern astrophysical data, we live in an infinite, open Universe.

However, the issue is much more complicated. First of all, we must keep in mind that we may not know all the forms of existence of matter, and the discovery of new forms may change the value of the average density of matter.

But even if it were possible to determine the average density absolutely accurately, the question of the finiteness or infinity of the Universe would not be finally resolved. The fact is that, apparently, it cannot be solved definitively in the sense in which we solve many other questions of science, that is, to obtain a clear answer like “yes” or “no.”

The theory of relativity revealed the relative nature of a number of physical quantities that previously seemed absolute and unchangeable. Several years ago, Moscow astronomer A. Zelmanov managed to prove that the property of space to be finite or infinite is also relative. The space of the Universe, finite and closed in one frame of reference, can at the same time be infinite and open in another.

Thus, we are faced with an unusual and at the same time instructive situation, which shows that nature is much more complex than our formal logical ideas about it, that its properties and phenomena have a dialectical character.

Mysterious galactic nuclei

Over the past decades, astronomers have discovered a number of non-stationary objects in the Universe, where rapid physical processes occur and very significant qualitative changes occur in relatively short periods of time.

These studies began with the discovery in 1962 of so-called radio galaxies, i.e. galaxies whose radio emission is many times stronger than the thermal radio emission inherent in any cosmic object whose temperature is above the temperature of absolute zero. The most striking example is the double radio galaxy in the constellation Cygnus (radio source Cygnus A). Although this cosmic “radio station” is located at a huge distance of about 600 million light years from us, its radio emission received on Earth has the same power as the radio emission of the quiet Sun. But the distance to the Sun is about eight light minutes, i.e. 400 billion times less!

In order for any radio station, including natural ones, to work, it must be powered with energy. What are the energy sources that are capable of providing powerful radio emission from radio galaxies for millions of years?

In recent years, more and more evidence has accumulated indicating that this energy is generated as a result of violent physical processes occurring in the nuclei of galaxies - concentrations of matter located in the central parts of many stellar islands of the Universe.

For example, the core of our own Galaxy shows undoubted signs of activity. As radio observations have shown, it continuously emits hydrogen in quantities reaching one and a half solar masses per year.

If we take into account that the age of our Galaxy is about 15–17 billion years, it turns out that about 25 billion solar masses were ejected from its core, which is already about one-eighth of the mass of the entire Galaxy.

At the same time, the phenomena that we observe in the core of our stellar system at the present time are most likely only faint echoes of past, much more violent processes that took place in that era when our Galaxy was younger and richer in energy. In any case, galaxies are known whose nuclei are much more active, and in some stellar systems this activity even becomes explosive. For example, in the core of the M-82 galaxy, apparently, a huge explosion occurred several million years ago, as a result of which a colossal amount of gas was ejected. And now these gas masses are rushing at tremendous speed from the center of the Galaxy to its outskirts.

Astrophysicists have calculated that the kinetic energy of the explosion in M-82 is about 3"1052 J. To make this number more tangible, suffice it to say that to obtain such energy it would be necessary to explode a thermonuclear charge with a mass equal to the mass of 15 thousand suns...

These and other similar facts indicate that galactic nuclei are apparently not only powerful sources of energy, but also have a very significant influence on the development of stellar systems.

Even more grandiose sources of energy turned out to be the familiar quasars, discovered in 1963 and located at very large distances from our Galaxy, near the boundaries of the observable Universe.

In terms of their size, quasars cannot be compared with galaxies. Astronomical observation data indicate that the diameters of their cores range from several light weeks to several light months, while the diameter of our Galaxy is 100 thousand light years. However, the total radiation energy of quasars is about a hundred times greater than the radiation energy of the most gigantic galaxies known to us.

Moreover, there is now almost no doubt that the Universe around us also occurred as a result of a giant explosion and subsequent expansion of a compact clump of super-dense hot plasma.

All these discoveries showed that the most complex physical processes are taking place in the Universe, associated with irreversible changes in space objects, excluding the possibility of returning to previous states. And such changes occur not only slowly and gradually, but also in relatively short periods of time, spasmodically.

Thus, research in recent decades has led scientists to the conclusion that, contrary to previously existing ideas, many phases of the process of development of space objects are characterized by sharp nonstationarity, which is expressed in explosive phenomena, disintegration, dispersion, etc. Such processes are associated with the formation of new space objects. objects, their transformations, as well as transitions of matter from one physical state to another,

“... Development is spasmodic, catastrophic, revolutionary,” wrote V.I. Lenin, ““interruptions of gradualism”; the transformation of quantity into quality;... interdependence and the closest, inextricable connection of all aspects of each phenomenon;... a connection that gives a single, natural world process of movement - these are some features of dialectics...” [Lenin V. I, Karl Marx, - Paul, coll. cit., vol. 26, p. 55. 135].

The discovery of non-stationary processes in the Universe convincingly confirms that the dialectical nature is inherent not only in the process of scientific knowledge, but also in nature itself.

If from this point of view we look at non-stationary phenomena in space, it becomes clear that they represent “turning points” in the development of space objects, where transitions of matter from one qualitative state to another occur, and new celestial bodies arise.

It became clear: the ideas of classical science about the stationary nature of most cosmic processes in fact turned out to be only one of the first approximations to the true picture of the world, an approximation whose capabilities were limited both by the level of development of research methods and by the general state of natural science,

On the other hand, it should be noted that it has not yet been possible to find a satisfactory explanation of the nature of non-stationary phenomena in the Universe within the framework of modern fundamental physical theories. From the point of view of these theories, such phenomena seem to be very unusual, extremely “outlandish”.

Will it be possible to explain them in terms of existing fundamental physical theories, or will this require completely new ideas?

One of these ideas was put forward by the famous Soviet astrophysicist Academician V. A. Ambartsumyan. According to Ambartsumyan’s hypothesis, super-dense clumps of “prestellar” matter are present in the cores of galaxies.

It is very possible that these clumps are directly related to that “original,” superdense matter, as a result of the decay of which the Metagalaxy arose. It is possible that during the process of explosion and expansion, the “original” substance did not react all at once.

Some of the clots, for one reason or another, could remain in a stable state for a long time; their subsequent decay, perhaps, leads to those energy “bursts” that occur in the Universe.

But what could superdense prestellar matter be? What is its physical nature? Unfortunately, at present we have too little data at our disposal to provide any reasonable answer to this question.

One gets the impression that the properties of prestellar matter, if it really exists, are so unusual that they are unlikely to be described using known physical theories. It may very well be that there are some physical laws at work here that are still unknown to modern science.

However, not all modern physicists and astrophysicists agree with this conclusion.

It is quite possible that the explanation of gigantic cosmic energies will be obtained along completely different paths.

Fusion or...?

The problem of cosmic energies is associated not only with active phenomena in galactic nuclei and quasars, but also with negative results of neutrino observations of the Sun.

American physicist R. Denis created a very sensitive installation for recording solar neutrinos. Observations were carried out over a long period of time and brought a very unexpected result. It turned out that the solar neutrino flux is at least six times less than what follows from the existing theory, based on the assumption of the thermonuclear nature of solar and stellar energy sources.

The need for serious testing of this theory is also indicated by some other results of recent solar studies.

Several years ago, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a highly sensitive device was created for measuring extremely weak magnetic fields on the Sun - a solar magnetograph. Observations made using this device revealed a very interesting fact. It turned out that the solar surface pulsates rhythmically with a period of about 2 hours. 40 minutes, rising with each pulsation to a height of about 20 km.

According to Academician V.A. Ambartsumyan, the discovery of Crimean astronomers is of paramount importance.

It not only indicates a qualitatively new process on the Sun, but should also provide important information about the internal structure of our daylight star. As theoretical calculations show, the value of the pulsation period of the Sun is directly related to its internal structure. A period of 2 hours. 40 min., corresponds to a more uniform distribution of density and temperature, as well as lower values ​​of these physical quantities for the central part of the daylight than follows from the modern theory of the structure of the Sun. In particular, the temperature in the center of the Sun in this case should not be 15 million degrees, but only 6.5 million.

But under such physical conditions, the thermonuclear reaction cannot provide the observed output of solar energy.

There is one more independent consideration that casts doubt on the validity of the thermonuclear hypothesis. The fact is that in the atmosphere of the Sun (as well as in the atmospheres of other similar stars) lithium and beryllium are present in significant quantities. But in the case of thermonuclear reactions, these elements should have “burned out” long ago.

Recently, the conclusion about the pulsation of the Sun, obtained by Crimean astrophysicists under the leadership of Academician A. N. Severny, was confirmed in the works of English astronomers who carried out observations at the famous French observatory Cic du Mudy.

The first attempts were made to explain this phenomenon. Thus, scientists at the University of Cambridge (England) suggested that the central part of the Sun contains twice as much heavy elements as previously thought. However, such a hypothesis inevitably leads to a radical revision of modern physical ideas about the structure of the Sun and stars.

Further testing of the thermonuclear hypothesis is associated primarily with the implementation of new neutrino observations of the daylight. The possibility cannot be ruled out that neutrinos from the Sun still fly, but their energy is below the threshold value for which the Davis installation was designed.

In this regard, Soviet physicists are working on creating more sensitive detectors for detecting neutrinos - on helium and lithium. It is expected that with the help of such detectors, which will be installed in an underground laboratory, in the near future it will be possible to carry out a new, more accurate test of the intensity of the solar neutrino flux and thereby establish whether the thermonuclear hypothesis really needs a radical revision.

An interesting assessment is given by Academician V.A. Ambartsumyan to the new results of solar research.

Question. Can the results obtained by Academician Severny, as well as the negative result of neutrino observations of the Sun, be considered unexpected, since they contradict the generally accepted hypothesis about the thermonuclear source of intrasolar and intrastellar energy?

Ambartsumyan. It is necessary to understand that existing theoretical models are so tentative that they do not withstand accurate quantitative comparisons when it comes to new phenomena.

Question. Therefore, when we are talking about phenomena that have not yet been sufficiently studied, observations are more important than theoretical developments?

Ambartsumyan. Astronomy is primarily an observational science. One observational discovery of this kind, which was made in Crimea, is worth more than a thousand unsuccessful theoretical works that do not have an exact quantitative basis. Being a theoretician myself, I dare to express this opinion frankly.

Gravitational collapse and “black holes”

Let's return to the question of the geometric properties of the Universe. As we already know, they are closely related to the nature of the distribution of matter.

Let's imagine that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic. What does it mean? Let us mentally divide the Universe into many regions, each of which contains a fairly large number of galaxies. Then homogeneity and isotropy mean that the properties and behavior of the Universe in each epoch are the same, for all such areas in all directions. The most important property of a homogeneous and isotropic Universe is its constant curvature at all points in space.

However, in the real Universe, especially if we consider relatively small regions of it, matter is distributed unevenly. Its concentration is different for different regions, and therefore the corresponding curvature is different. It may be less than the average for the entire space, or it may significantly exceed it.

At one time, the famous American physicist R. Oppenheimer (1904–1967) considered an interesting possibility based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

If a very large mass of matter ends up in a relatively small volume, then an unprecedented catastrophe occurs - gravitational collapse - a catastrophic contraction of matter to a point where the density can, in principle, reach an infinite value.

During the compression process, the magnitude of the gravitational field on the surface of the collapsing object increases, and a moment comes when not a single particle, not a single ray of light can overcome the enormous attraction and escape from inside such a formation to the outside. To do this, it would be necessary to develop a speed exceeding the speed of light, and this is completely impossible, since the speed of light is the maximum speed of propagation of any real physical processes in nature.

Thus, the space of the collapsed object seems to collapse, and for an external observer it actually ceases to exist. A so-called “black hole” is formed...

However, this was only a purely theoretical study, carried out, so to speak, for future use, according to the principle often used by theoretical physicists: if “this”, then “that”. In other words, some basically possible imaginary situation is considered and it is found out what consequences it can lead to.

But this is precisely the strength of a scientific theory: very often in the process of further development of natural science, an imaginary situation turns out to be quite real, and then, in advance, the theoretical research carried out immediately acquires practical interest.

This happened with the prediction regarding the existence of “black holes”. In recent years, a number of phenomena have been discovered in the depths of the Universe, indicating the possibility of concentrating huge masses of matter in relatively small regions of space.

In this regard, astrophysicists remembered the theory of gravitational collapse. Further development of this theory led scientists to the conclusion that “black holes” can arise in the final stages of the life of massive stars whose mass is 3–5 times greater than the mass of the Sun. After the energy sources in the bowels of such a star are exhausted, it begins to shrink under its own gravity and turn into a “black hole.” It is possible that “black holes” can appear in the Universe under other circumstances. Of course, in order to be convinced of the real existence of such objects, theoretical calculations alone are not enough. It is necessary to detect at least one real “black hole” in the Universe.

However, this task is very difficult. It is impossible to register a single “black hole”: it does not manifest itself in anything. Therefore, the idea of ​​searching for “black holes” in double star systems arose. About half of all the stars in our Galaxy are close binary systems, where two stars orbit a common center of mass, quite often at very close distances from one another.

There are binary systems in which one star is bright and the other is dark. If the mass of a dark star is 3–5 times greater than the solar one, then we can assume that it is an extinct star, which, after exhausting its internal energy, has collapsed to the “black hole” stage. According to the calculations of the Soviet scientist R. Sunyaev, an interesting physical process should be observed. If the central component in a binary system is a sufficiently massive star, then, like all similar stars, it should emit a large amount of gas, which will be sucked into the “black hole.” But gas particles do not get there directly, but, since the entire system rotates, they move around the “black hole” along spiral trajectories and only gradually approach the critical distance. A gas disk forms around the “black hole”. Due to friction, the gas is heated to very high temperatures, at which intense X-ray radiation occurs.

In 1974, an object was discovered that seemed to meet all the specified requirements. It is located in the constellation Cygnus and is named Cygnus X-1.

This is a double star. Its luminous component has a mass equal to twenty-eight solar masses, and its dark component - ten. Intense X-ray radiation comes from this area. There are quite good reasons to assume that the specified object is a “black hole”.

However, there is no absolute certainty about this yet. In astrophysics, we always have to take into account the fact that the external physical manifestations of some object that we discover can theoretically correspond to those expected, but be generated by a different cause. And to finally be convinced that Cygnus X-1 is indeed a “black hole”, additional and varied observations are needed.

However, there are many other objects in the Universe regarding which there are “suspicions” that they belong to the category of “black holes”. However, to what extent these suspicions are justified, the future will show.

But if “black holes” really exist, then the properties of these objects are very unusual. They are undoubtedly worthy representatives of an “increasingly strange world.”

First of all, it is not easy to imagine how a gigantic mass can be pulled together into a geometric point. But this is not enough...

Let's imagine a situation that is often depicted by authors of science fiction works. A traveler on a spaceship carelessly approached the “black hole” and was sucked into the fatal abyss. Falling along with the matter, our traveler will at some point cross that critical line, due to which there can be no return, and rush to the center of the “black hole”. What will happen to him next? Let's try to trace his fate.

Approaching the center of the “black hole” together with the collapsing matter, our imaginary observer will discover that the density and curvature tend to infinity. We cannot even imagine what this means, since our modern physical theories are obviously inapplicable to such states.

However, there is one interesting hypothesis, according to which the compression of the collapsing matter will slow down at some point, and the matter compressed to the limit will begin to expand again.

Of course, a real observer, falling into a “black hole,” would be instantly twisted and torn into atoms.

But let’s assume that an imaginary observer will survive the monstrous compaction and other “troubles” and wait for the reverse expansion to begin. Continuing to move with the scattering matter, it will once again, now in the opposite direction, cross the critical sphere and again find itself in “free” space.

But then he will be faced with a striking surprise: this will not be the space from which he fell into the “black hole,” but a space located in relation to the space of our Universe in the absolute future. Translated into a more understandable language, this means that no matter how long we live in our space, we will never get into “that” space - only through a “black hole”, because the adjacent space into which it leads appears, apparently, along with her education. And there is no way back at all.

If all this is really so, then “black holes” are nothing more than the entrance holes of through tunnels connecting our Universe with adjacent spaces, a kind of drains through which matter from our space is distilled into neighboring ones.

It is tempting to compare with this phenomenon the violent ejections of matter and energy that we observe in such cosmic objects as quasars and galactic nuclei. Are quasars and galactic nuclei connected with the exit holes of “black holes” located in adjacent universes?!

I recall the statement of the famous English astrophysicist James Jeans, who back in 1928 suggested that the centers of galaxies are “special points” where matter flows into our world from some other, completely extraneous space.

It is also possible that not only matter penetrates through the “tunnels” connecting different worlds, but also some influences still unknown to us, which can influence many phenomena occurring in our Universe.

However, this tempting idea runs into a fairly simple objection. In fact, if the adjacent space associated with the “black hole” is formed only at the moment of its emergence, then in the entire Universe there can only be one single hole connecting us with that very “black hole” that gave birth to our space . Meanwhile, we observe quasars and active galactic nuclei in quite a large number...

But maybe everything is much more complicated than we think? - Until recently, we were convinced that our space is simply connected. This means that in the Universe there are no pieces torn from each other, separated by insurmountable “chasms”. The presence of “black holes” calls into question the simply connected nature of world space. Or maybe its geometry is even more intricate and there are numerous bizarre interweavings of adjacent spaces, connected to each other through necks, originating in “black holes”?

A look into the future

The main difficulties on the horizon of modern astrophysics are associated with non-stationary phenomena discovered in the Universe.

Research in recent decades has shown that, contrary to previously existing ideas, many phases of the process of development of space objects are characterized, as we already know, by sharp non-stationarity.

V.I. Lenin repeatedly emphasized that all phenomena in the world appear as a unity (identity) of opposites. This means “recognition (discovery) of contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature...” [Lenin V, I, Paul. collection cit., vol. 29, p. 317].

Each of the contradictory sides of a single whole is capable of turning into its opposite; opposites transform into each other; interaction, the struggle of opposites is the source of development.

This is the key to understanding the nature of non-stationary objects. Such objects are natural phases in the evolution of cosmic objects, turning points in the development of cosmic bodies and their systems, associated with transitions from one physical state to another.

Although it has not yet been possible to satisfactorily explain the nature of non-stationary phenomena within the framework of existing concepts, it cannot be denied that the laws and theories of modern physics are applicable to a huge range of conditions and phenomena. But at the same time, it is impossible to absolutize the modern system of knowledge about the world, which represents only a certain stage in the knowledge of the Universe. This system of knowledge only approximately and incompletely reflects the infinite variety of world phenomena and processes, and it not only can, but also must be subject to clarification, generalizations and additions.

It is appropriate to quote the words said on this occasion by the famous Soviet scientist, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR G. N. Naan: “At any level of development of civilization, our knowledge will represent only a finite island in the endless ocean of the unknown, the unknown, the unknown. There will always be unresolved problems and undiscovered laws, and each solved problem will give rise to one or more new ones. The path of knowledge is a road without a finish!”

Can we really expect any superfundamental discoveries from modern astrophysics?

In principle, this is possible. But the discovery of new laws of nature can only occur through the study of unusual physical conditions and states of matter. Perhaps one of these states is the state of ultra-high density at the beginning of the expansion of the Universe, in “black holes”, and perhaps inside the so-called neutron stars, which have a monstrous density - millions and billions of tons per cubic centimeter. In any case, we do not yet know the laws operating in such conditions. Thus, there is an assumption that there is a certain “elementary length” that manifests itself only in superdense states. And it is possible that astrophysical research will help discover it.

A number of major modern scientists, such as F. Hoyle and L. Burbidge, Academician V. A. Ambartsumyan, believe that existing physics is clearly insufficient to explain the phenomena occurring in the nuclei of galaxies and quasars.

“Attempts to describe them within the framework of the now known fundamental physical theories,” writes V. A. Ambartsumyan, “are encountered with enormous, perhaps insurmountable, difficulties. I believe that it is from astronomy that we should expect in the near future the identification of new facts that will require the formulation of new physical theories, more general than those known now.”

However, as the famous Soviet theoretical physicist Academician V.L. Ginzburg notes, a convincing answer to the questions in question cannot be obtained through reasoning and discussion alone - it will be given only by life itself, that is, by subsequent development of science.

Currently, the flow of information about physical phenomena in space is growing every day, especially thanks to the development by astrophysicists of the X-ray and gamma-ray range of electromagnetic waves.

A number of very interesting sources of X-ray radiation have been discovered, and mysterious powerful bursts of gamma radiation have been recorded. Further study of these and other physical phenomena in space will help deepen and expand our knowledge of the Universe.

Microworld and megacosmos

The fact that modern physics is clearly not complete, that the existing physical theory faces deep and serious difficulties and does not answer a number of fundamental questions, is recognized by physicists themselves. This means that the question comes down to where the new facts necessary to take the next fundamental step forward in understanding the laws of physical processes will come from. Will these facts be obtained as a result of studying the Universe or obtained in the field of research of microprocesses?

At first glance, it might seem that, despite their rather close cooperation, astronomy and physics should be interested in directly opposite problems.

For astronomers, this means elucidating the behavior of large-scale objects and processes, revealing the laws of the megacosmos, which is characterized by colossal distances - up to 1028 cm and huge time intervals of up to 1017 s. On the contrary, physicists study elementary particles and phenomena, the laws of the microworld, penetrating into ultra-small subatomic space-time regions, down to 10~15 cm and up to 10–27 s.

However, it would be wrong to think that the tasks in question are mutually exclusive, that there is nothing in common between them. Microcosm and megacosmos are two sides of the same process, which we call the Universe.

No matter how gigantic the size of a particular cosmic system, it ultimately consists of elementary particles. On the other hand, many microprocesses are a reflection of cosmic phenomena covering colossal areas of space.

The need for a joint study of the microcosm and the megacosmos, the study of deep connections between microphenomena and megaprocesses is also dictated by the fact that in the world in which we live, in the macrocosm, the properties of “big” and “small” intersect like the rays of a searchlight,

After all, we ourselves and all the objects around us consist of elementary particles, and at the same time we are part of the megacosmos.

As we have already noted, modern physics of the microworld has penetrated into areas of phenomena that are characterized by scales of the order of 10~15 cm, and astrophysics studies objects that are characterized by distances up to 1028 cm. Forty-three decimal orders! Such is the scale of the spatial material within which modern science has the opportunity to obtain information about natural processes.

At the same time, a significant fact is revealed - the physical laws operating in different parts of this scale, even at its opposite ends, never come into conflict with each other.

This circumstance, on the one hand, serves as very convincing evidence in favor of the validity of one of the most important provisions of materialist dialectics about the universal interconnection and interdependence of natural phenomena, and on the other hand, it suggests that our scientific theories correctly reflect the properties of the real world.

Moreover, it can be assumed that in the depths of some cosmic objects, such as, for example, quasars or galactic nuclei, there are physical conditions under which the areas of micro- and megaprocesses seem to merge. Here, such high densities of matter are achieved that gravitational forces become comparable to the electromagnetic and nuclear forces acting in the microcosm. According to the famous Soviet theoretical physicist A. Smorodinov, nature appears before us here in its most complex version. This means that, apparently, this is where the keys to elucidating the astrophysical history of the Universe are hidden.

Basis - vacuum

Since, on the one hand, all material cosmic objects, be they stars or galaxies, planets or nebulae, consist of elementary particles, and on the other hand, the Universe is non-stationary and its past is not identical to its present, the question naturally arises about whether elementary particles are always existed in the same form; in which they exist in our era,

According to one of the hypotheses discussed in modern natural science, the state of the Universe that preceded the formation of the initial clot of hot plasma, as a result of the expansion of which the Metagalaxy was formed, was a vacuum.

At one time, it was believed that a vacuum was simply nothing, an emptiness, a space completely devoid of matter, a kind of arena in which all the material processes occurring in nature take place.

But these, at first glance, such natural, self-evident ideas were destined to undergo very serious changes over time. First it turned out that complete emptiness does not exist in nature. It does not exist even where there is a complete absence of any substance. Already in the 19th century, M. Faraday (1791–1867) argued that “matter is present everywhere and there is no intermediate space not occupied by it.”

Any region of space is always filled, if not with matter, then with some other types of matter - various radiations and fields (for example, magnetic fields, gravitational fields, etc.).

But even with this amendment, space still remained a gigantic container containing countless material objects. However, later more astonishing things became clear. Imagine for a moment that we somehow managed to completely devastate some area of ​​space, expel all particles, radiation and fields from it. So, even in this case, there would be “something” left, a certain supply of energy that cannot be taken away from the vacuum by any means.

It is believed that in a vacuum, at any point in space, there exist “unborn” particles and fields of absolutely all possible types. But their energy is not high enough for them to appear as real particles.

The presence of an infinite number of such hidden particles is called zero-point vacuum oscillations. In particular, in a vacuum photons of all possible energies and frequencies move in all directions (electromagnetic vacuum).

Thus, each of us is constantly permeated by a stream consisting of an innumerable variety of particles. But since these particles fly “and” in all directions, their flows mutually balance each other, and we do not feel anything, just as we do not feel the colossal pressure of a column of atmospheric air, since it is balanced by the air pressure from inside the human body.

Despite all its apparent implausibility, the idea of ​​zero-point vacuum oscillations is by no means a spectacular physical and mathematical construction.

In cases where the uniformity of the flow of hidden particles is for some reason disrupted and more such particles move in one direction than in the opposite direction, zero-point vacuum oscillations begin to manifest themselves. When an atom occurs, specific effects must occur, and some of them have been experimentally recorded...

So, vacuum is capable of giving birth to particles under certain conditions, and it is possible that it was vacuum that gave birth to those particles from which the Metagalaxy was subsequently formed.

According to some theoretical assumptions, the space surrounding us at extremely short distances has an unusually complex fine-grained structure with a fantastic energy density.

Each cubic micrometer of this medium contains an amount of energy that is quite enough to form many trillions of galaxies.

Thus, the very space surrounding the pass represents an almost bottomless source of energy. But this energy is “sealed” by powerful gravitational forces. However, for nature itself, this gravitational barrier, apparently, is not an insurmountable obstacle. As already mentioned, vacuum is capable of generating material particles. And it is quite possible that those powerful energy bursts that we observe in the Universe are the result of such interactions of matter, radiation and vacuum, in which energy is drawn from the vacuum.

But if so, then it is not impossible that science will master the secret of extracting energy from a vacuum and thereby free humanity from worrying about energy resources forever.

Big and small

The study of “black holes” leads us to another somewhat unexpected and exotic conclusion about the possible connection between micro- and mega-phenomena.

Like any object that has some mass, a “black hole” has a certain gravitational field. But since not a single physical signal can “escape” from the “black hole,” this field is static in nature.

If the “black hole” also has an electric charge, then its electromagnetic field should also be static. Moreover, the theory shows that both of these fields are practically independent of the way charge and mass are distributed inside the “black hole.” If at the moment of the formation of the “black hole” this distribution was heterogeneous, then any inhomogeneities in the future are very quickly smoothed out.

Thus, to an external observer, a “black hole” essentially looks like a point object with a certain mass and charge. If the “black hole” also rotates, then one more characteristic can be attributed to it - the so-called spin.

This creates an obvious analogy with an elementary particle, for which mass, charge and spin also serve as the main physical characteristics.

Of course, at this level of our knowledge it is difficult to say that this is only a purely external similarity or a reflection of some deep-seated dependencies between the micro- and megacosmos unknown to us, but this fact undoubtedly deserves attention. Moreover, several years ago the famous Soviet theoretical physicist Academician M. Markov made an interesting attempt. In a number of works, he showed that even within the framework of modern physical theories, the entire Universe, under certain conditions, can appear to an outside observer as an elementary particle, say, a proton or neutron.

But in this case, are all the particles we observe giant Universes? Universes that manifest themselves in our world as elementary particles? In other words, in the megaworld, as in the microworld, in principle, less can consist of more...

How to get to the point?

If there are really a lot of “black holes” in the Universe, then this means that in the world space there is a significant number of points at which the density becomes infinite. Such points are called singular.

Interest in the singularity is also explained by the fact that, according to the theory of the expanding Universe, it also “emerged” from a singularity, roughly speaking, from a point. And whatever the different versions of cosmological models, it is not possible to eliminate the initial singularity from them. The history of the Universe had to either begin or periodically pass through a state of a point with infinite density, at which any objects seemed to cease to exist.

A natural question: can real physical quantities go to infinity?

Generally speaking, infinities in physics can be not only “becoming” or potential, but also actual, i.e. “completed”. As an example of actual infinity, we can cite the infinity of the space of the Universe, if it is not closed.

The emergence of singularities during gravitational collapse follows from the general theory of relativity. However, modern physical theories, unfortunately, are not applicable to the description of physical processes occurring near singular points. The fact is that such states are not only within the purview of the general theory of relativity. At high densities, quantum effects should occur. But a physical theory that would unite relativistic and quantum phenomena does not yet exist.

In principle, it is possible that since the general theory of relativity is not applicable to the description of the states predicted by it itself with an infinite mass density at some point, then no singularities exist at all. As for their presence in the theory, this is nothing more than evidence of trouble, an indication that we are trying to apply the general theory of relativity beyond the limits of its applicability. But the whole question is where exactly these boundaries lie.

There is debate about what exactly the future general physical theory should be. However, there is no doubt about the need to clearly clarify the limits of applicability of the general theory of relativity in strong gravitational fields and near singularities.

According to many major researchers, the construction of a quantum gravitational theory and quantum cosmology, which would work at very high densities, and at moderate densities would turn into the usual classical theory, is currently the “number one task” of the science of the Universe.

The problem in question is closely related to the question of the physical nature of non-stationary phenomena discovered in the Universe in recent years. We are talking about the expansion of stellar associations and galaxy clusters, the activity of galactic nuclei, etc.

And although in these non-stationary phenomena we do not directly encounter singularities, nevertheless, most of these phenomena are associated with huge concentrations of matter and the release of colossal energies.

So far, it has not been possible to satisfactorily explain nonstationary phenomena within the framework of modern physical theories. In principle, two ways are possible. Perhaps the difficulties can be overcome by combining Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum physics. But it is possible that it is possible to describe special states of matter in the Universe (this point of view is supported by Academician V.A. Ambartsumyan) only by allowing for the possibility of violation of the known laws of physics in these states.

In this case, it will be necessary not only to expand the boundaries of applicability of the general theory of relativity to the area of ​​microprocesses, but also a significant change or generalization of this theory in the area of ​​macroprocesses, i.e., in the area where it is applied today.

In a singular state, the Universe actually becomes a micro-object. This circumstance once again demonstrates the close connection between the megacosmos and the microcosm. And as the Leningrad philosopher A. M. Mostepanenko emphasizes, in this regard, the future theory of elementary particles can hardly be built without taking into account cosmological circumstances; on the other hand, it is impossible to understand the laws of the structure of the Universe without taking into account the properties of micro-objects from which it ultimately consists of.

Therefore, the guiding idea on the path to creating a quantum theory of gravity should be the idea of ​​​​the influence of the microworld on the megaworld. In this regard, theoretical studies of the effect of the birth of elementary particles from vacuum in strong gravitational and electric fields, in particular near the cosmological singularity, are of great interest. There is even an exotic hypothesis according to which the Universe, having emerged from the “initial” singular state, was initially completely empty, and all matter and radiation arose from the vacuum only in the process of its further evolution.

However, even within the framework of such a hypothesis, significant difficulties remain that have not yet been overcome. The fact is that, according to one of the fundamental laws of physics, particles can only be born in pairs “particle” - “antiparticle”.

Meanwhile, as far as we now know, the Universe mainly consists of matter. It may very well be that the effect of the birth of particles from vacuum also operates in the modern Universe in various non-stationary explosive processes. It is possible, for example, that the electromagnetic fields of some cosmic objects have sufficient energy to cause the birth of particles. But all these problems still require in-depth theoretical research.

But one thing is already clear. Whatever the future quantum theory of gravity becomes, it will fundamentally change our understanding of space-time.

The following should also be noted. The method of constructing various theoretical models is one of the very effective ways to study the Universe. Such models are, for example, the “Friedman Universe” - a theoretical model of a homogeneous isotropic expanding Universe or the “Zelmanov Universe” - a model of an inhomogeneous anisotropic Universe. These and other models are based on modern fundamental physical theories, primarily the general theory of relativity.

However, it should always be remembered that the model is not the Universe itself, but only an attempt to reflect some of its aspects. Therefore, it would be erroneous to automatically identify the conclusions of one or another model with reality.

Only observations can confirm the validity of a particular model. On the other hand, even the most extravagant theoretical constructions deserve a certain amount of attention, since they can reveal certain specific properties of the real world.

From elementary particles to the Milky Ways

The relationship between micro- and macroprocesses is one of the specific expressions of the dialectics of nature, the universal interconnection of its phenomena.

Already now, in a number of cases, it is difficult to distinguish between cosmology and the theory of elementary particles. The focus of modern astrophysics is on cosmic objects that are extremely dense and sometimes very small in size.

Thus, among the various solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe the properties and evolution of the Universe, as we already know, there is a solution of the singularity type (when at some point the density reaches an infinite value). Essentially, a singularity is a kind of analogue of an elementary particle. The universe in its initial singular state actually turns into an elementary particle.

The question arises: is it possible to explain some properties of elementary particles using the equations of the general theory of relativity, and use our knowledge about the properties of elementary particles to clarify the physical essence of certain cosmic phenomena, in particular the laws of the evolution of the Universe?

One of the most pressing problems of modern astrophysics and natural science in general is the problem of the origin of stars and stellar island galaxies.

On this score, there are two opposing concepts in modern astrophysics. According to one of them, the most common (it is usually called classical), space objects, including stars and galaxies, are formed by condensation, condensation of diffuse matter of gas and dust.

Another concept, developed by Academician V.A. Ambartsumyan and his school and called Byurakan (after the name of the observatory), on the contrary, proceeds from the fact that the evolution of cosmic objects proceeds from more dense states to less dense ones and that, in particular, “embryos” stars and galaxies are hypothetical superdense objects of very small sizes, the explosive decay of which leads to the formation of various celestial bodies.

Currently, there is a heated debate between supporters of both directions, and it is not yet possible to give final preference to either of them. This is explained, on the one hand, by the lack of observational data, and on the other, by the possibility of different, sometimes directly opposite, interpretations of the same facts. In particular, no one has ever observed either the process of condensation of diffuse matter into stars or hypothetical superdense bodies.

In this regard, the famous Soviet astrophysicist B. A. Vorontsov-Velyamov not so long ago made an interesting assumption that, perhaps, to some extent, supporters of both points of view are right: it is possible that in the infinitely diverse Universe processes take place as concentration of matter and its decay.

An interesting attempt to construct a cosmogonic model, which to a certain extent would combine both existing concepts of the formation of stars and galaxies, was made by the Soviet theoretical physicist R. Muradyan.

Muradyan's main idea is to use some properties of elementary particles to clarify the physical essence of cosmic phenomena, in particular the laws of the evolution of the Universe.

In the physics of the microworld, on the basis of very general theoretical considerations, all elementary particles are divided into three classes: the first class includes the photon - a portion of electromagnetic radiation, the second - the electron and neutrino, the third class - hadrons - the most numerous (several hundred of them are now known). This class includes, in particular, the proton, neutron and meson particles with masses intermediate between the mass of the electron and the mass of the proton. A significant part of hadrons are unstable particles with a very short lifetime. Particularly short-lived particles are called resonances.

Among them there are particles whose masses are several times greater than the mass of a proton. And there is an assumption according to which the “mass spectrum” of elementary particles generally extends to infinity. If such an assumption is true, then this means that under certain conditions macroscopic and even cosmic objects can be born in ultra-small space-time regions. In any case, the modern theory of elementary particles allows such a possibility.

In this case, aren’t the superdense bodies of Academician Ambartsumyan a hadronic form of existence of matter? This, at first glance, very unexpected idea put forward by R. Muradyan, opens up interesting prospects for the construction of a unified theory of the formation of space objects. According to the new hypothesis, the Metagalaxy was formed as a result of the decay of a superheavy superhadron with a mass of 1056 g. This was the “primary atom,” that superdense clot of matter that gave rise to the observable Universe. Its decay into smaller hadrons led to the formation of protoclusters of galaxies, and subsequent decays into hadrons with even smaller masses led to the formation of galaxies.

The next stage was the decay into hadrons with masses less than 1034. This was a kind of “phase transition” from the hadron form to the nuclear one. In this case, objects such as neutron stars arose. Further decays, according to Muradyan, should have led to the formation of a diffuse cloud, inside which, as a result of the condensation of matter, condensations of “protostars” first appeared, and then the process of star formation proceeded in accordance with the usual classical scheme.

However, if in the usual classical picture of the formation of cosmic objects the diffuse medium consists of hydrogen and helium, then in Muradyan’s model it can have a different chemical composition depending on the characteristics of the decay of the objects preceding it. This means that heavy chemical elements can arise not only due to supernova explosions, as is now commonly believed, but also as a result of the fission of even heavier particles. This is very important, since the classical theory of the origin of heavy elements encounters a number of serious difficulties.

Thus, if in ordinary classical astrophysics the evolutionary process proceeds from objects more rarefied to less rarefied and from “disorder” to “order,” then in Muradyan’s model, over a very significant interval of the existence of the Metagalaxy, evolution, on the contrary, proceeds from objects more dense to less dense and from more ordered to less ordered.

It is easy to see that in this part Muradyan’s evolutionary scheme is in good agreement with Ambartsumyan’s ideas. However, since the phase transition from hadronic to nuclear matter, it is closer to classical cosmogony.

Of course, it is still difficult to say to what extent Muradyan’s original model corresponds to reality - the development of this model is just beginning. But the new approach to solving the problem is very interesting, since an attempt has been made to combine micro-phenomena and cosmic processes.

As is known, one of the important criteria for the validity of a particular theoretical model is its ability to predict certain phenomena. If Muradyan’s hypothesis is correct and the Metagalaxy really arose as a result of the decay of a superhadron, then it should have its own rotation, since the original superhadron had its own rotation. So the discovery of the rotation of the Metagalaxy would be, if not a confirmation of Muradyan’s model, then, in any case, important evidence in its favor.

Sometimes the idea is expressed that in general any cosmogonic models, including Muradyan’s hypothesis, are purely speculative, since they cannot be verified by observations.

However, considerations of this kind cannot be considered convincing. Modern cosmogony stands on a solid observational basis. More and more advanced and powerful means of astronomical research make it possible to study increasingly distant space objects. But, as you know, the further away this or that space object is located, the deeper in the past we observe it. This means that the question of the correspondence of certain cosmogonic models with reality can, in principle, be resolved by observation.

The world as it is

Since we are talking about the structure and evolution of the Universe, about the scientific picture of the universe, the question naturally arises: why is the world the way it is? Exactly this one, and not some other?

However, it is hardly possible to obtain a sufficiently definite answer to a question posed in this way.

The problem is formulated too vaguely.

And apparently, it is no coincidence that, touching on the same problem, A.L. Zelmanov limited himself to only the statement that the Universe exists in the form in which it is, due to internal necessity.

In order to obtain a comprehensive answer to the question that interests us, we would need to go beyond the observable Universe and embrace the world in all its infinite diversity. And this, alas, is impossible both in principle and for purely practical reasons,

Let's try, however, to narrow the problem. Limit it to such an extent that it acquires a real physical meaning. Obviously, we should only talk about the observable Universe and those of its properties that are determined by the laws known to us.

As for the question itself, to which we want to get an answer, it will now look something like this: is it accidental that the world immediately surrounding us has precisely these properties, and not some others?

In this form, the problem becomes quite legitimate, since precisely the version of the Universe that we observe is far from the most probable among all conceivable options.

It is also necessary to understand this because, as religious theorists claim, the harmony of the universe is the result of the activity of the creator.

“It’s enough to look at the nature around us,” writes Russian Orthodox priest L. Gaidukevich. - Amazing order reigns everywhere. Every phenomenon, from the simplest blade of grass to the myriads of stars, is arranged expediently, intelligently and perfectly. Everything bears the stamp of the constant care of the Almighty - the Creator.”

First of all, it should be noted that we observe a certain picture of the world due to the fact that it is precisely such a picture that provides the possibility of life. As A.L. Zelmanov wittily noted, we are witnesses to processes of a certain type, because processes of a different type proceed without witnesses.

In particular, it is no coincidence that we live in an expanding Universe and observe a red shift in the spectra of galaxies. The mutual removal of galaxies and the shift of their radiation towards long waves weakens the energy of electromagnetic radiation penetrating outer space. If the galaxies did not scatter, but came closer, their spectra would show not a red shift, but a violet shift - a shift towards high frequencies and hard, short-wave radiation. The radiation density in such a Universe would be so high that it would exclude the possibility of the existence of biological life...

What are the most common forms of the space objects that surround us? These are stars, dust, gas. As for dust and gas, a significant proportion of the matter of the Universe is concentrated in gas and dust nebulae. But these are transitional forms.

Apparently, in the modern Universe one of the most stable forms of isolated cosmic objects is the stellar form. Is it a coincidence that in the most diverse corners of the observable Universe, matter is concentrated into stars?

The famous American science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has a witty story that describes how a certain space construction company, on the instructions of certain “customers,” created... a Metagalaxy. Of course, this is a joke, and the writer needed such a technique in order to identify certain patterns, peculiar rules of the game.

These “rules of the game” are the whole essence of the matter. If we have the ball and the players, that's not all. You can play a variety of games with the same ball. In order for a game to acquire a certain meaning and character, it is necessary to subject it to certain rules.

Let's put ourselves in the place of the fantastic designers of the Universe. Before starting to create it, we would have to not only establish the main properties of its basic elements, but also develop a certain set of laws that determine the behavior and interaction of all material objects without exception.

What are the laws due to which, in the real Universe, it is the stars that have the predominant right to exist?

In living nature, as is known, natural selection operates. Only those organisms that are best adapted to environmental conditions survive.

It seems that a kind of natural selection is at work in the Universe. In the process of matter movement, a wide variety of objects can arise, but most of them turn out to be unstable and quickly collapse.

And at the same time, some space objects, mainly stars, for some reason are quite stable and capable of existing for quite a long time. Why is this so?

Apparently, the fact is that there is a certain “universal regulator” operating in the Universe. There is a consideration in favor of the fact that this regulator is the so-called feedback.

Nowadays, in the era of rapid development of cybernetics, electronics and all kinds of automatic processes, this term is widely known. Feedback is used to control the flight of rockets, the operation of machines and mechanisms; without it there would be no radios and televisions, and much more.

Simply put, feedback is the adjustment of certain actions depending on the effect they cause.

Cybernetics gives a more precise definition. Imagine a certain system, say: a car or an airplane, a human brain or a spaceship, or, finally, the Sun. Let's take a plane, for example. When controlling an airplane, the pilot moves the levers, presses certain buttons, these are input signals. And every time the plane somehow reacts to such actions: it increases or decreases its flight speed, gains or loses altitude, makes a turn or a loop. These are the output signals. Feedback occurs when output signals influence input signals, changing them accordingly. Let's say the plane is losing altitude too steeply, and the pilot, noticing this, slightly takes the helm, reducing the angle of descent.

Man used feedback long before scientists formulated this concept and began to apply it in various technical systems. When taking any action, we not only necessarily take into account its consequences, but also make the necessary adjustments along the way.

Something similar happens in nature. It is the presence of feedback in a number of phenomena in the surrounding world that ensures the sustainable, stable nature of many natural processes. A simple example: the so-called physical pendulum. Any deviation from the equilibrium position causes the appearance of a force that returns the pendulum to this position.

Feedback manifests itself not only in living, but also in inanimate nature. We encounter self-regulating systems in the world of stars, in chemical transformations, and in electrical processes - in a word, at almost every step.

A typical example is our Sun.

According to modern physical concepts (which, despite the unexpected results of neutrino and some other observations, have not yet been rejected and are generally accepted), the powerful energy of our star is born in its deep bowels, where the thermonuclear reaction seethes and bubbles. Man, as is known, also mastered a similar reaction and learned to extract the energy released when hydrogen nuclei combine into helium nuclei. But so far, the artificial thermonuclear reaction proceeds instantly, and all the energy is released in the form of an explosion. The sun, on the other hand, consumes energy gradually and slowly, maintaining the operation of its nuclear furnace at a strictly defined level.

But how does this mean “supporting”? After all, the Sun has neither its own mind nor a “control panel” on which any intelligent beings would work. This is where we meet feedback and self-regulation.

Apparently, thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen occurs in the very central region of the star. This zone is surrounded on all sides by monstrous masses of matter. Powerful gravity pulls them towards the center of the Sun, but this is prevented by the colossal pressure of gases born in the thermonuclear flame. In this way, relative equilibrium is achieved.

But for some reason the intensity of the thermonuclear reaction drops somewhat. Then the temperature and pressure decrease, and under the pressure of the surrounding substance the reaction zone begins to shrink. Compression increases pressure and temperature, and the reaction returns to normal. And vice versa, if for some reason the intensity of fusion increases, the excess energy expands the star. The expansion causes cooling of the central zone, which continues until the reaction returns to its normal course.

The sun is a special case, a star, one of the specific forms of existence of matter. But scientists have long noticed some general patterns - evidence that the feedback principle is one of the fundamental properties of the world.

One of these patterns was found by the Russian physicist E. X. Lenz (1804–1865) in electromagnetic phenomena. In school textbooks it is presented in the form of the “Lenz rule”, which has a purely practical significance - it allows you to determine the direction of the induction current. In fact, this is one of the cases that illustrates the principle of feedback. Any change in the magnetic field causes the appearance of an induction current, the magnetic field of which, in turn, counteracts the changes that caused this current.

Similar laws - some of which are probably yet to be discovered - are visible in many other phenomena. It is feedback and natural self-regulation that explains the absence of chaos in nature and the harmony of the universe.

Only those space objects where feedback operates and self-regulation is carried out are guaranteed a sufficiently long existence. It is not difficult to guess that it is precisely such objects that will be encountered more often than others. Here is a possible answer to the question that interests us about why there are so many stars in the Universe.

But you can also ask the following question: why are the stars themselves exactly like this, and not some others? In this regard, V. A. Ambartsumyan expressed an interesting idea that many features of the structure of the Universe, including many properties of stars, are, as it were, “embedded” in the properties of elementary particles. And if these properties were any different, then space objects would look different than in reality.

Thus, the theory of the internal structure of stars comes to the conclusion that the maximum possible mass of a star is directly proportional to the mass of the Sun and inversely proportional to the square of the mass of the nucleus of a hydrogen atom - the proton. But this formula can easily calculate that the maximum mass of a stable star cannot exceed approximately 75 solar masses. But this is with the mass that protons have in our world. What if the mass of the proton were different? Let's say, a hundred times smaller? In such a world, there could be completely stable stars with masses on the order of tens of thousands of solar masses...

But here the following question inevitably arises: why does the proton have just such a mass, and not some other?

The answer to this and other similar questions that will follow one after another is a matter for the future.

Modern picture of the world and atheism

As we have already noted, the natural science of the 19th century, which was based on classical physics with its absolute predetermination of all world events, essentially left no room for any kind of divine intervention.

It is no coincidence that Laplace, in response to Napoleon’s question about why he does not mention God anywhere in his scientific works, replied: “I do not need this hypothesis.”

The revolution in physics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and everything that followed it convincingly showed the illegality of mechanistic ideas about the universe and destroyed the harmonious picture of the world built by classical physics.

This circumstance has given rise to modern religious theorists to assert that non-classical physics of the 20th century, unlike classical physics, supposedly not only allows for the existence of God and supernatural forces, but also provides convincing evidence for this. “New physics, by its very appearance, testifies in favor of religious ideas. Physics leads us to the gates of religion,” says Catholic theorist Bishop O. Spülbek.

And some leaders of the Orthodox Church, which generally prefers to stay away from the complexities of modern natural science, have taken approximately the same position. Thus, one of the theoreticians of Orthodoxy, Archbishop Luke, directly stated that the scientific discoveries of the early 20th century allegedly shook the materialistic foundations of natural science in favor of idealism and religion.

Impressed by the revolutionary changes in science, some major naturalists also took a step towards religion. “It can probably be said,” wrote the English physicist A. Eddington, “that the conclusion that can be drawn from ... modern science is that religion first became possible for the intelligent scientist about 1927.”

Modern religious theorists, to justify religion, are also trying to use the fact that the development of natural science in the 20th century led scientists to the conclusion about the endless diversity of nature and the inexhaustibility of the world. If the world is inexhaustible, they say, there is room for God in it.

In reality, nothing like this happens.

The fact is that the materialism of classical physics was a mechanical, metaphysical materialism that tried to reduce all world processes to one simplest form of movement, excluding the possibility of qualitative transformations of matter.

And the new, non-classical physics of the 20th century, and then astrophysics, strikes not at the materialism of classical physics, but at its claims to explain everything that exists from a mechanical point of view. Non-classical physics is no less materialistic than classical physics, but it is materialism of a higher order - dialectical materialism.

Both new physics and astrophysics do not at all need the hypothesis of God; they reveal the natural causality and natural pattern of all phenomena.

The fact that the world is infinitely diverse and inexhaustible does not change anything. Yes, in the process of studying it, science faces increasingly complex problems. But this is natural - after all, the task of science is to understand the deeper essence of phenomena.

It is also natural that in this endless process of cognition, each new step is associated with overcoming more serious difficulties.

However, as we can see, science always goes through ways to overcome them, pushing further and further the boundaries of our knowledge.

Thus, modern natural science provides absolutely no grounds for reconsidering the basic question of the material unity of the world.

Once again about the revolution in modern astronomy

If we consider science as a socially determined activity for the production of knowledge, then in the development of astronomy of the 20th century we can distinguish three stages, each of which is characterized by a certain attitude of society towards the science of the Universe.

At the beginning of the century, some branches of astronomy (celestial navigation, time measurement, geodetic measurements) were considered from a purely utilitarian point of view. And those sections of this science that are basic, in particular astrophysics, at first glance, were little used in the life of society. Astrophysical research was looked at only as a way to satisfy the curiosity of a person who wanted to know what world he lives in. Astrophysical research carried out at that time subsequently found wide application in the practice of space exploration. Thus, even in that era, astronomy was associated with practice, but it modeled future practice (astronomy was a practical science even in the times of Copernicus - and then it modeled patterns of future practice).

The initial prerequisites for astronomical research at the beginning of the 20th century were: a mechanical picture of the world, ideas about the Universe as part of a mechanical system and about the omnipotence of man, who is able to explore everything and find out everything.

The revolution in physics changed the connections between astronomy and society. It created prerequisites for the further development of science about the Universe that did not exist before. The changes that have occurred in the knowledge system have opened up new opportunities for astronomical activity. We are talking, in particular, about applications to the study of cosmic processes of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

The first stage is characterized by two fundamental achievements in the science of the Universe: the discovery of the expansion of the Universe (A. Friedman and E. Hubble - 20s) and the promotion of the idea of ​​the natural nature of non-stationary phases in the development of space objects (V. A. Ambartsumyan - 1934 .). True, this idea at that time had not yet been embodied in astronomical observations.

In general, astrophysics was just beginning its “run”.

The beginning of the second stage of the revolution in astronomy dates back to the period after the Second World War. The rapid development of electronics, automation, and radio engineering brought to life new elements of activity, which led to rapid progress in astrophysics. Ambartsumyan’s idea about the regularity of non-stationary stages in the development of celestial bodies received widespread development and convincing confirmation in astronomical observations. Astrophysics has become an evolutionary science.

An analysis of the further development of astrophysics shows that in recent years a new stage has begun in the production of astronomical knowledge - the third stage of the revolution in astronomy.

Revolutionary changes have occurred in the very nature of astronomical activity - astronomy has become an all-wave science. And since this was mainly the result of the development of space technology, the stage in question can rightfully be called the space stage.

In theoretical terms, this stage is characterized by attempts to reconsider the idea of ​​an exploding Universe from new positions, to look at it from a different angle. The tendency to consider nonstationary phenomena in the Universe not as processes of an explosive nature, but as manifestations of gravitational collapse, i.e., peculiar anti-explosions, is becoming increasingly widespread. Thus, we are talking about a direction that is essentially opposite to the idea of ​​​​an exploding Universe.

An analogy with the early stages of the development of astronomical science involuntarily arises. The Ptolemaic system tried to explain the structure of the world based on the fact that the directly observable movements of the heavenly bodies are their actual movements. From this the conclusion was drawn about the central position of the Earth in the Universe.

Copernicus showed that behind these visible movements lies a completely different phenomenon - the revolution of the Earth around the Sun (i.e., the world is not the same as we directly observe it).

A logical question arises: isn’t the idea of ​​explosions the first superficial stage of explaining non-stationary phenomena, and the idea of ​​collapses, which denies it, the next, deeper stage?

It is still difficult to answer this question - there is a struggle between two concepts. However, it is necessary to keep in mind the following: being a negation of the Ptolemaic system, the Copernican system itself was by no means the final solution to the question of the universe. In the process of further development of science, it entered as a component first into Herschel’s system of the Galaxy, and then into the system of the expanding Metagalaxy. Moreover, each of the successive systems of the world, in essence, was a description of a certain limited system of material objects: the Ptolemy system was a description of the spherical Earth, the Copernican system - the Solar system, the Herschel system - our Galaxy.

Thus, if we draw an analogy between the situation that has developed in modern astrophysics and the earlier stages of the development of astronomy, then the events occurring in modern astrophysics, apparently, should be considered as a natural, but transitory stage in the knowledge of complex physical processes unfolding in the infinitely diverse Universe . It is possible that explosive phenomena and gravitational collapse are two sides of a single process of evolution of cosmic objects, and in the course of further development of science they will be included in the system of phenomena that have a more general nature.

The Department of Astronomy at St. Petersburg University is one of the oldest in Russia. It was established in January 1819. The first head of the department was Academician V.K. Vishnevsky, after him it was occupied by Academician A.N. Savich for more than 40 years. In 1881, through the efforts of Professor S.P. Glazenap, the Astronomical Observatory was founded at the University, which in 1992 was transformed into the Astronomical Institute.

Over the years, outstanding scientists studied, worked and taught at the Astronomical Department - V.A. Ambartsumyan, V.V. Sobolev, V.A. Dombrovsky, V.V. Sharonov, K.F. Ogorodnikov, M.F. Subbotin and other. The department is particularly proud of the fact that two of its graduates - academicians V.A. Ambartsumyan and A.A. Boyarchuk - headed the International Astronomical Union for a number of years.

Currently, the Astronomical Department of the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of St. Petersburg University consists of the Astronomical Institute and three departments: astronomy, celestial mechanics, and astrophysics. The Institute includes laboratories of theoretical astrophysics, observational astrophysics, active galactic nuclei, astrometry, celestial mechanics and stellar astronomy, radio astronomy and solar physics. About 80 scientists work at the institute and departments, including 21 doctors and 43 candidates of science.

The department's scientific and educational laboratories are equipped with modern equipment. The Special Astronomy Library, numbering about 20,000 items, receives many Russian scientific periodicals and major astronomical journals from abroad. All resources are used by both employees and graduate students and students of the Astronomical Department.

University astronomers conduct observations on many telescopes in Russia, near and far abroad: on a 6-meter optical telescope and on a 600-meter radio telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on telescopes at the Pulkovo and Crimean Observatories, as well as on large telescopes in France, Germany, Italy and even in the Hawaiian Islands. Collaboration with the world's leading astronomical institutions has become an integral part of the life of university astronomers.

Astronomical research

Modern astronomy studies a wide variety of objects - from the neighboring Moon and artificial celestial bodies to quasars located at the “edge” of the Universe. These are stars, large and small planets, their satellites, galaxies and quasars, dust and gas clouds, radiation, gravitational and magnetic fields, as well as cosmic rays. The Universe is a unique physical laboratory that makes it possible to study matter in all states, including those inaccessible to research using the methods of “terrestrial” physics.

Many areas of astronomical research are represented at St. Petersburg University. Let's list the most important ones:

• fractal structure of the Universe
• galaxies with active nuclei
• hidden mass in galaxies
• spiral structure of our Galaxy
• kinematics of stars
• interaction of radiation and matter in various space objects
• synthesis of chemical elements in stars
• stars with protoplanetary systems
• solar radio emission
• dynamics of interplanetary matter
• evolution of orbits in planetary and satellite systems
• mathematical methods for processing astronomical observations
• calculation of telescope design and optics

As a rule, scientific research is carried out in close cooperation with employees of institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Main (Pulkovo) Astronomical Observatory, Special Astrophysical Observatory, etc., as well as foreign institutes and observatories.

Every year, University astronomers publish 1-2 books and about 90 articles, half of them in international scientific journals. The achievements of the University’s astronomers are marked by prestigious awards, a large number of personal and collective grants, and numerous invitations to Russian and international scientific conferences. The names of our scientists are on maps of the Moon and Mars. In honor of the astronomical observatory of Leningrad University, the asteroid Aoluta is named, 9 others are named after outstanding astronomers of the University.

Astronomy training

According to the university tradition, leading scientists deliver lectures and work with graduate and undergraduate students. The student learning process can be divided into two stages:

• at the first stage, basic mathematical, physical and astronomical disciplines are studied, as well as programming,
• in the second, the focus is on training in one of eight specializations (astrometry, celestial mechanics, stellar astronomy, theoretical astrophysics, observational astrophysics, radio astronomy, solar physics, physics of planetary systems).

The total duration of study at the Astronomical Department of St. Petersburg University is 6 years.

After choosing a specialization, senior students listen to lectures and participate in seminars in various areas of modern astronomy, for example: space astrometry, dynamics of stellar systems, physics and evolution of stars, physics of galaxies and galaxy clusters, radio astronomical studies of the Sun, relativistic and stochastic celestial mechanics, etc.

A special place in the training of students is occupied by astronomical observational practices, some of which take place at the largest observatories and institutes in our country, near and far abroad. Much attention in the learning process is paid to the active development of computer technologies. This is facilitated by the high level of equipment of the Astronomical Institute with both modern computing facilities and the latest computer programs for processing astronomical observations and modeling space objects.

Undergraduate and graduate students of the Astronomy Department are directly involved in scientific research under the guidance of senior colleagues. This is extremely important for the formation of highly qualified specialists capable of conducting scientific work at the world level.

The Astronomical Department of St. Petersburg State University provides fundamental education that can be applied in a wide variety of areas of human activity. Graduates of the astronomy department work in astronomical institutions of St. Petersburg - the Main (Pulkovo) Astronomical Observatory, the Institute of Applied Astronomy, the Astronomical Institute of St. Petersburg University, as well as in institutes and observatories in Russia and the CIS countries. A considerable number of graduates undergo internships and work abroad: in Germany, the USA, France, Sweden, Finland, Poland and other countries. In addition to scientific activities, graduates of the department find themselves as teachers of elite schools and universities, programmers, and specialists in the field of computer and network technologies. After graduation, students can enter graduate school to continue scientific work and defend a dissertation.