School encyclopedia. Beautiful space objects that are clearly visible from the earth Is it possible to see the galaxy with the naked eye

By understanding how and when galaxies, stars and planets could have appeared, scientists are closer to solving one of the main mysteries of the Universe. they claim that as a result of the big bang - and it, as we already know, occurred 15-20 billion years ago (see “Science and Life” No.) - exactly the kind of material arose from which celestial bodies and their clusters could subsequently be formed .

Planetary gas nebula Ring in the constellation Lyra.

The Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus.

Great Orion Nebula.

The Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus.

The Andromeda nebula is one of the closest neighbors of our Galaxy.

The satellites of our Galaxy are galactic clusters of stars: the Small (above) and Large Magellanic Clouds.

An elliptical galaxy in the constellation Centaurus with a wide dust lane. It is sometimes called the Cigar.

One of the largest spiral galaxies visible from Earth through powerful telescopes.

Science and life // Illustrations

Our Galaxy - the Milky Way - has billions of stars, and they all move around its center. It's not just the stars that spin in this huge galactic carousel. There are also foggy spots, or nebulae. Not many of them are visible to the naked eye. It’s a different matter if you look at the starry sky through binoculars or a telescope. What kind of cosmic fog will we see? Distant small groups of stars that cannot be seen individually, or something completely, completely different?

Today, astronomers know what a particular nebula is. It turned out that they are completely different. There are nebulae consisting of gas, they are illuminated by stars. They are often round in shape, which is why they are called planetary. Many of these nebulae were formed by the evolution of aging massive stars. An example of a “foggy remnant” of a supernova (we’ll talk about what it is later) is the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus. This crab-shaped nebula is quite young. It is known for sure that she was born in 1054. There are nebulae that are much older, their age is tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

Planetary nebulae and remnants of once-exploded supernovae could be called monument nebulae. But other nebulae are also known, in which stars do not go out, but, on the contrary, are born and grow. Such, for example, is the nebula that is visible in the constellation Orion, it is called the Great Orion Nebula.

Nebulas, which are clusters of stars, turned out to be completely different from them. The Pleiades cluster is clearly visible to the naked eye in the constellation Taurus. Looking at it, it is difficult to imagine that this is not a cloud of gas, but hundreds and thousands of stars. There are also “richer” clusters of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of stars! Such stellar “balls” are called globular star clusters. A whole retinue of such “tangles” surrounds the Milky Way.

Most of the star clusters and nebulae visible from Earth, although located at very large distances from us, still belong to our Galaxy. Meanwhile, there are very distant nebulous spots that turned out to be not star clusters or nebulae, but entire galaxies!

Our most famous galactic neighbor is the Andromeda nebula in the constellation Andromeda. When viewed with the naked eye, it appears as a hazy blur. And in photographs taken with large telescopes, the Andromeda nebula appears as a beautiful galaxy. Through a telescope, we see not only the many stars that make it up, but also the stellar branches emerging from the center, which are called “spirals” or “sleeves.” In size, our neighbor is even larger than the Milky Way, its diameter is about 130 thousand light years.

The Andromeda Nebula is the closest and largest known spiral galaxy. The beam of light goes from it to the Earth “only” about two million light years. So, if we wanted to greet the “Andromedans” by honking at them with a bright spotlight, they would find out about our efforts almost two million years later! And the answer from them would come to us after the same time, that is, back and forth - approximately four million years. This example helps to imagine how far the Andromeda nebula is from our planet.

In photographs of the Andromeda nebula, not only the galaxy itself, but also some of its satellites are clearly visible. Of course, the satellites of the galaxy are not at all the same as, for example, the planets - satellites of the Sun or the Moon - a satellite of the Earth. Satellites of galaxies are also galaxies, only “small” ones, consisting of millions of stars.

Our Galaxy also has satellites. There are several dozen of them, and two of them are visible to the naked eye in the sky of the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere. Europeans first saw them during Magellan's trip around the world. They thought they were some kind of clouds and named them the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The satellites of our Galaxy are, of course, closer to Earth than the Andromeda nebula. Light from the Large Magellanic Cloud reaches us in just 170 thousand years. Until recently, this galaxy was considered the closest satellite of the Milky Way. But recently, astronomers have discovered satellites that are closer, although they are much smaller than the Magellanic Clouds and are not visible to the naked eye.

Looking at the “portraits” of some galaxies, astronomers discovered that among them there are ones that are unlike the Milky Way in structure and shape. There are also many such galaxies - these are both beautiful galaxies and completely shapeless galaxies, similar, for example, to the Magellanic Clouds.

Less than a hundred years have passed since astronomers made an amazing discovery: distant galaxies are scattering from one another in all directions. To understand how this happens, you can use a balloon and do a simple experiment with it.

Using ink, a felt-tip pen, or paint, draw small circles or squiggles to represent galaxies on the ball. As you begin to inflate the balloon, the drawn “galaxies” will move further and further away from each other. This is what happens in the Universe.

Galaxies rush, stars are born, live and die in them. And not only stars, but also planets, because in the Universe there are probably many star systems, similar and dissimilar to our Solar system, which was born in our Galaxy. Recently, astronomers have already discovered about 300 planets moving around other stars.

Events dedicated to the 55th anniversary of the first manned space flight continue in the capital. The exhibition "Russian Space" opens on May 18. Especially for this event, we have collected some interesting facts about the Universe. Even children often ask these seemingly ordinary questions. But they sometimes baffle adults themselves. What is the temperature in space, can you hear the sound of planets and how many stars are there in the Universe - read in our material.

From Earth you can see galaxies with the naked eye

From Earth, we can see as many as four galaxies with the naked eye: our Milky Way and Andromeda (M31) are visible in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest closest to us. But if you equip yourself with a large enough telescope, you can see many thousands more galaxies. They will be visible as hazy spots of various shapes.

The solar system is almost 4.5 billion years old

Looking at the night sky, we look into the past

When we look into the night sky and see the stars we are familiar with, we are truly looking into the past.

This is because what we are actually seeing is light sent from a very distant object many years ago. All the stars that we see from Earth are many light years away from us. And the further away the star is, the longer it takes for its light to reach us.

For example, the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.3 million light years away. That is, that is exactly how long its light travels to us. We see the galaxy as it actually was 2.3 million years ago. And we see our Sun eight minutes late.

The sun rotates unevenly around its axis. At the equator - in 25.05 Earth days, at the poles - in 34.3 days

There is not absolute silence in space

Our ears perceive air vibrations, and in space, due to the airless environment, we really cannot hear any sounds.

But that doesn't mean they aren't there. In fact, even a rarefied gas or vacuum can conduct sound of a very long wavelength, inaudible to our ears. Its source can be collisions of gas and dust clouds or supernova explosions.

Of course, we cannot hear such electromagnetic waves. But some spacecraft have instruments that can capture radio emission, and scientists, in turn, can convert it into sound waves. For example, we can listen to the "voice" of the giant Jupiter taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2001.

What is the temperature in space

In fact, our usual idea of ​​temperature does not quite apply to outer space. Temperature is the state of matter, and as is known, there is practically no such state in outer space.

But still, outer space is not lifeless. It is literally permeated with radiation from a variety of sources - collisions of gas and dust clouds or supernova explosions and much more.

It is believed that the temperature in outer space tends to absolute zero (the minimum limit that a physical body can have in the Universe). Absolute zero temperature is the origin of the Kelvin scale, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius.

Planets and their satellites, asteroids, meteorites and comets, cosmic dust and much more play an important role in shaping the temperature of space. Because of this, the temperature may fluctuate. In addition, vacuum is an excellent heat insulator, something like a huge thermos. And due to the fact that there is no atmosphere in space, objects in it heat up very quickly.

For example, the temperature of a body placed in space near the Earth and exposed to the rays of the Sun can rise to 473 degrees Kelvin, or almost 200 Celsius. That is, space can be both hot and cold, depending on what point you measure it at.

The moon moves away from our planet by about four centimeters every year

Space is not black

Although we all see a black night sky, and the blue color during the day is due to the atmosphere of our planet. It would seem that everything is simple: space is black because it is dark there. But what about the stars? After all, in fact, there are so many of them that the cosmos must be permeated with their light.

From Earth, we don't see stars everywhere because the light from many of them simply can't reach us. In addition, our solar system is located in a relatively quiet, rather dull and dark part of the galaxy. And the stars here are scattered very far from each other. The closest to our planet, Proxima Centauri, is located 4.22 light years from Earth. This is 270 thousand times further than the Sun.

In fact, if we consider space in the entire range of electromagnetic radiation, it brightly emits mainly radio waves from various astronomical objects. If our eyes could see them, we would live in a much brighter Universe. But now it seems to us that we live in complete darkness.

The Sun makes up 99.86 percent of the total mass of the Solar System

The largest star in the Universe

Of course, we are talking about the largest star known to us. Scientists estimate that the Universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies, each of which, in turn, contains from several million to hundreds of billions of stars. It is not difficult to guess that there may be such giants in them that we do not even suspect.

It turned out that the question of which star is the largest is ambiguous even for scientists themselves. Therefore, we will talk about three currently known giants. For quite a long time, VY was considered the largest star in the constellation Canis Major. Its radius is from 1300 to 1540 solar radii, and its diameter is about two billion kilometers. For comparison, the diameter of the Sun is 1.392 million kilometers. If we imagine our star as a one-centimeter ball, then the diameter of VY will be 21 meters.

The most massive star known is R136a1 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It's hard to imagine, but the star weighs as much as 256 Suns. She is the brightest of all. This blue hypergiant shines ten million times brighter than our star. But in terms of size, the R136a1 is far from the largest. Despite its impressive brightness, it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye because it is located 165 thousand light years away.

Currently, the leader of the list of enormousness is the red hypergiant NML Cygnus. Scientists estimate the radius of this star to be 1650 radii of our star. To better imagine this supergiant, let's place the star at the center of our solar system instead of the Sun. It will occupy all of outer space up to the orbit of Jupiter.

In Earth's orbit there is a "dump" of waste from the development of astronautics. More than 370 thousand objects weighing from a few grams to 15 tons revolve around our planet.

Most of the planets in the solar system can be seen without a telescope

At suitable times, we can observe Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn from Earth. These planets were discovered back in ancient times.

Distant Uranus is also sometimes visible to the naked eye from Earth. But before its discovery, the planet was simply mistaken for a dim star. Because of their great distance, scientists learned about the existence of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto only with the help of a telescope. From Earth with the naked eye we will not be able to see only Neptune and Pluto, which, however, is no longer considered a planet.

Life not only on Earth?

There is another celestial body in the Solar System, on which a number of scientists still admit the presence of life. Even in the most primitive forms. This is Saturn's moon Titan.

Titan has a large number of lakes. True, you won’t be able to swim in them: unlike those on earth, they are filled with liquid methane and ethane.

Nevertheless, Titan is considered similar to Earth at the very beginning of its development. Because of this, some scientists believe that the simplest forms of life may exist in the underground reservoirs of Saturn's moon.

• Space debris– failed spacecraft, spent rocket and other devices and their debris that are in near-Earth orbits.
• Weightlessness is a state in which the gravitational forces acting on a body do not cause mutual pressure of its parts on each other.
• Solar wind is a stream of electrons and protons at high speeds constantly emitted by the Sun.
• A black hole is a region of space with such a powerful gravitational field that neither matter nor radiation can leave it. They appear at the final stage of the evolution of some very large stars.
• Exoplanets are planets located outside the solar system.
• A comet is a small object revolving around the Sun in a highly elongated elliptical orbit. When approaching the Sun, it forms a cloud or tail of dust and gas.
• A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars and star clusters, interstellar gas, dust and dark matter.
• A star is a massive ball of gas that emits light and is held together by its own gravity and internal pressure.
• A rocket is an aircraft that moves due to the action of jet thrust arising from the rejection of part of the vehicle’s own mass. Flight does not require air or gas.
• A cosmodrome is an area with a complex of special structures and technical systems intended for launching spacecraft.
• Gravity is the attraction of material objects to each other.
• A planet is a celestial body revolving in orbit around a star. Massive enough to become rounded by its own gravity, but not massive enough to initiate a thermonuclear reaction.
• An asteroid is a relatively small celestial body in the Solar System moving in orbit around the Sun. It is significantly inferior in mass and size to planets, has an irregular shape, and has no atmosphere.
• A light year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year.
• Vacuum is a space free of matter.
• A nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas or dust. It stands out against the general background of the sky due to its emission or absorption of radiation.

Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences E. LEVITAN, full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

Science and life // Illustrations

One of the best modern astrophysical observatories is the European Southern Observatory (Chile). In the photo: a unique instrument of this observatory - the New Technologies Telescope (NTT).

Photo of the reverse side of the 3.6-meter main mirror of the New Technologies Telescope.

Spiral galaxy NGC 1232 in the constellation Eridanus (distance to it is about 100 million light years). Size - 200 light years.

Before you is a huge gas disk, perhaps heated to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin (its diameter is about 300 light years).

It would seem a strange question. Of course, we see the Milky Way and other stars of the Universe that are closer to us. But the question posed in the title of the article is actually not so simple, and therefore we will try to figure it out.

The bright Sun during the day, the Moon and the scattering of stars in the night sky have always attracted human attention. Judging by the rock paintings, in which the most ancient painters depicted the figures of the most noticeable constellations, even then people, at least the most inquisitive of them, peered into the mysterious beauty of the starry sky. And of course they showed interest in the rising and setting of the Sun, in the mysterious changes in the appearance of the Moon... This is probably how “primitive contemplative” astronomy was born. This happened many thousands of years earlier than writing arose, the monuments of which have already become for us documents testifying to the origin and development of astronomy.

At first, the heavenly bodies, perhaps, were only a subject of curiosity, then - deification, and, finally, began to help people, acting as a compass, calendar, clock. A serious reason for philosophizing about the possible structure of the Universe could be the discovery of “wandering stars” (planets). Attempts to unravel the incomprehensible loops that describe the planets against the background of supposedly fixed stars led to the construction of the first astronomical pictures or models of the world. The geocentric system of the world of Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century AD) is rightfully considered their apotheosis. Ancient astronomers tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to determine (but not yet prove!) what place the Earth occupied in relation to the seven then known planets (these were considered the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). And only Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) finally succeeded.

Ptolemy is called the creator of the geocentric, and Copernicus - the heliocentric system of the world. But fundamentally, these systems differed only in the ideas they contained about the location of the Sun and Earth in relation to the true planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and to the Moon.

Copernicus essentially discovered the Earth as a planet, the Moon took its rightful place as a satellite of the Earth, and the Sun turned out to be the center of revolution of all planets. The sun and six planets moving around it (including the Earth) - this was the solar system as it was imagined in the 16th century.

The system, as we now know, is far from complete. Indeed, in addition to the six planets known to Copernicus, it also includes Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The latter was discovered in 1930 and turned out to be not only the most distant, but also the smallest planet. In addition, the Solar System includes about a hundred satellites of planets, two asteroid belts (one between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the other, recently discovered, the Kuiper Belt, in the region of the orbits of Neptune and Pluto) and many comets with different orbital periods. The hypothetical “Cloud of comets” (something like their sphere of habitation) is located, according to various estimates, at a distance of about 100-150 thousand astronomical units from the Sun. The boundaries of the solar system have accordingly expanded many times over.

At the beginning of 2002, American scientists “talked” with their automatic interplanetary station Pioneer 10, which was launched 30 years ago and managed to fly away from the Sun to a distance of 12 billion kilometers. The response to the radio signal sent from Earth arrived in 22 hours 06 minutes (at a speed of radio waves of about 300,000 km/sec). Taking into account what has been said, Pioneer 10 will have to fly for a long time to the “borders” of the Solar system (of course, quite conditional!). And then he will fly to the closest star on his path, Aldebaran (the brightest star in the constellation Taurus). "Pioneer 10" may arrive there and deliver the messages of earthlings embedded in it only in 2 million years...

We are separated from Aldebaran by at least 70 light years. And the distance to the closest star to us (in the a Centauri system) is only 4.75 light years. Today, even schoolchildren should know what a “light year”, “parsec” or “megaparsec” is. These are already questions and terms of stellar astronomy, which simply did not exist not only in the time of Copernicus, but also much later.

It was assumed that the stars were distant bodies, but their nature was unknown. True, Giordano Bruno, developing the ideas of Copernicus, brilliantly suggested that the stars are distant suns, and, perhaps, with their own planetary systems. The correctness of the first part of this hypothesis became completely obvious only in the 19th century. And the first dozens of planets around other stars were discovered only in the very last years of the recently ended 20th century. Before the birth of astrophysics and before the application of spectral analysis in astronomy, it was simply impossible to get closer to the scientific solution to the nature of stars. So it turned out that the stars played almost no role in the previous systems of the world. The starry sky was a kind of stage on which the planets “performed,” and they did not think much about the nature of the stars themselves (sometimes they were referred to as ... “silver nails” stuck in the firmament of heaven). The “sphere of stars” was a kind of boundary of the Universe in both the geocentric and heliocentric systems of the world. The entire Universe, naturally, was considered visible, and what was beyond it was the “kingdom of heaven”...

Today we know that only a tiny fraction of stars are visible to the naked eye. The whitish stripe stretching across the entire sky (Milky Way) turned out, as some ancient Greek philosophers guessed, to be a multitude of stars. Galileo (at the beginning of the 17th century) discerned the brightest of them even with the help of his very imperfect telescope. As the size of telescopes increased and they improved, astronomers were able to gradually penetrate into the depths of the Universe, as if probing it. But it did not immediately become clear that the stars observed in different directions of the sky had some relation to the stars of the Milky Way. One of the first who managed to prove this was the English astronomer and optician W. Herschel. Therefore, the discovery of our Galaxy (it is sometimes called the Milky Way) is associated with his name. However, it is apparently not possible for a mere mortal to see our entire Galaxy. Of course, it is enough to look into an astronomy textbook to find clear diagrams there: a view of the Galaxy “from above” (with a distinct spiral structure, with arms consisting of stars and gas-dust matter) and a view “from the side” (in this perspective, our stellar island resembles biconvex lens, if you do not go into some details of the structure of the central part of this lens). Schemes, diagrams... Where is at least one photograph of our Galaxy?

Gagarin was the first earthling to see our planet from outer space. Now, probably, everyone has seen photographs of the Earth from space, transmitted from artificial Earth satellites, from automatic interplanetary stations. Forty-one years have passed since Gagarin's flight, and 45 years have passed since the launch of the first satellite - the beginning of the space age. But to this day, no one knows whether a person will ever be able to see the Galaxy by going beyond its borders... For us, this is a question from the realm of science fiction. So let's get back to reality. But just at the same time, please think about the fact that just a hundred years ago, current reality could seem like the most incredible fantasy.

So, the Solar System and our Galaxy have been discovered, in which the Sun is one of trillions of stars (about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye in the entire celestial sphere), and the Milky Way is a projection of part of the Galaxy onto the celestial sphere. But just as in the 16th century earthlings realized that our Sun is the most ordinary star, we now know that our Galaxy is one of many other galaxies now discovered. Among them, as in the world of stars, there are giants and dwarfs, “ordinary” and “extraordinary” galaxies, relatively quiet and extremely active. They are located at enormous distances from us. The light from the closest of them rushes towards us for almost two million three hundred thousand years. But we can see this galaxy even with the naked eye; it is in the constellation Andromeda. This is a very large spiral galaxy, similar to ours, and therefore its photographs to some extent “compensate” for the lack of photographs of our Galaxy.

Almost all discovered galaxies can only be seen in photographs taken using modern giant ground-based telescopes or space telescopes. The use of radio telescopes and radio interferometers has helped to significantly supplement optical data. Radio astronomy and extra-atmospheric X-ray astronomy have lifted the curtain on the mystery of the processes occurring in the nuclei of galaxies and in quasars (the most distant currently known objects in our Universe, almost indistinguishable from stars in photographs taken using optical telescopes).

In an extremely huge and practically hidden from view megaworld (or in the Metagalaxy), it was possible to discover its important patterns and properties: expansion, large-scale structure. All this is somewhat reminiscent of another, already discovered and largely unraveled microworld. There they study the very close to us, but also invisible building blocks of the universe (atoms, hadrons, protons, neutrons, mesons, quarks). Having learned the structure of atoms and the patterns of interaction of their electron shells, scientists literally “revitalized” D. I. Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Elements.

The most important thing is that man turned out to be able to discover and cognize worlds of various scales that were not directly perceived by him (megaworld and microworld).

In this context, astrophysics and cosmology seem to be not original. But here we come to the most interesting part.

The “curtain” of the long-known constellations opened, taking with it the last attempts of our “centrism”: geocentrism, heliocentrism, galaxycentrism. We ourselves, like our Earth, like the Solar System, like the Galaxy, are just “particles” of the structure of the Universe, unimaginable in ordinary scale and in complexity, called the “Metagalaxy”. It includes many galaxy systems of varying complexity (from “binaries” to clusters and superclusters). Agree that at the same time, awareness of the scale of one’s own insignificant size in the vast mega-world does not humiliate a person, but, on the contrary, elevates the power of his Mind, capable of discovering all this and understanding what was discovered earlier.

It would seem that it is time to calm down, since the modern picture of the structure and evolution of the Metagalaxy has been created in general terms. However, firstly, it conceals a lot of fundamentally new things, previously unknown to us, and secondly, it is possible that, in addition to our Metagalaxy, there are other mini-universes that form the still hypothetical Big Universe...

Maybe we should stop there for now. Because now, as they say, we would like to figure out our Universe. The fact is that at the end of the twentieth century it presented astronomy with a big surprise.

Those who are interested in the history of physics know that at the beginning of the twentieth century, some great physicists thought that their titanic work was completed, because everything important in this science had already been discovered and explored. True, a couple of strange “clouds” remained on the horizon, but few imagined that they would soon “turn into” the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics... Is something like this really awaiting astronomy?

It is quite likely, because our Universe, observed with the help of all the power of modern astronomical instruments and seemingly already quite thoroughly studied, may turn out to be just the tip of the universal iceberg. Where is the rest of it? How could such a daring assumption arise about the existence of something huge, material and completely hitherto unknown?

Let us turn again to the history of astronomy. One of her triumphant pages was the discovery of the planet Neptune "at the tip of a pen." The gravitational effect of some mass on the movement of Uranus prompted scientists to think about the existence of a still unknown planet, allowed talented mathematicians to determine its location in the solar system, and then tell astronomers exactly where to look for it on the celestial sphere. And in the future, gravity provided similar services to astronomers: it helped to discover various “outlandish” objects - white dwarfs, black holes. So now, the study of the movement of stars in galaxies and galaxies in their clusters has led scientists to the conclusion about the existence of a mysterious invisible ("dark") matter (or perhaps some form of matter unknown to us), and the reserves of this "matter" should be colossal.

According to the most daring estimates, everything that we observe and take into account in the Universe (stars, gas-dust complexes, galaxies, etc.) is only 5 percent of the mass that “should have been” according to calculations based on laws of gravity. This 5 percent includes the entire megaworld we know, from dust grains and cosmic hydrogen atoms to superclusters of galaxies. Some astrophysicists even include all-pervasive neutrinos here, believing that, despite their small rest mass, neutrinos with their countless numbers make a certain contribution to the same 5 percent.

But perhaps the “invisible matter” (or at least part of it, unevenly distributed in space) is the mass of extinct stars or galaxies, or such invisible cosmic objects as black holes? To some extent, such an assumption is not without meaning, although the missing 95 percent (or, according to other estimates, 60-70 percent) will not be made up. Astrophysicists and cosmologists are forced to consider various other, mostly hypothetical, possibilities. The most fundamental ideas boil down to the fact that a significant part of the “hidden mass” is “dark matter”, consisting of elementary particles unknown to us.

Further research in the field of physics will show which elementary particles, other than those that consist of quarks (baryons, mesons, etc.) or are structureless (for example, muons), can exist in nature. It will probably be easier to solve this mystery if we combine the forces of physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. Considerable hopes are placed on data that can be obtained in the coming years in the event of successful launches of specialized spacecraft. For example, it is planned to launch a space telescope (diameter 8.4 meters). It will be able to register a huge number of galaxies (up to 28th magnitude; recall that luminaries up to 6th magnitude are visible to the naked eye), and this will make it possible to construct a map of the distribution of “hidden mass” across the entire sky. Certain information can also be extracted from ground-based observations, since the “hidden matter,” having high gravity, should bend the rays of light coming to us from distant galaxies and quasars. By processing images of such light sources on computers, it is possible to register and estimate the invisible gravitating mass. Similar reviews of individual areas of the sky have already been made. (See the article by Academician N. Kardashev “Cosmology and SETI problems”, recently published in the popular science magazine of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Earth and the Universe”, 2002, No. 4.)

In conclusion, let us return to the question formulated in the title of this article. It seems that after all that has been said, it is unlikely that one can confidently give a positive answer to it... The oldest of the most ancient sciences, astronomy is just beginning.

Milky Way. In fact, the Milky Way is the name of the galaxy in which the solar system is located. But in everyday life this is the name for the cluster of stars visible from Earth that make up this galaxy. Since individual stars are not visible to the naked eye, the celestial landscape actually resembles a white stripe, or road, in the sky. The Milky Way is especially visible in autumn:

Andromeda Galaxy. The closest neighbor of our galaxy is visible to the naked eye - if you go outside the city, where there is no light. And with the help of binoculars or a telescope, the Andromeda Galaxy can be seen in the city:

This is the Pleiades - a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. Visible to the naked eye, especially visible in winter. True, we are talking about observations of the city, where there is no bright city lighting. But if you take a telescope, you can see the Pleiades in the city. To do this, you will need a reflecting telescope with a lens with a diameter of 100-115 mm - for example, Levenhuk Strike 115 PLUS with a 114 mm lens:

Orion Nebula. At night, when the sky is clear, a bright spot can be seen just below Orion's Belt. If you look through binoculars, it will become a cloud, and if you take a powerful telescope, the cloud will turn into such a fantastic cosmic flower, as in the photo:

Globular cluster in the constellation Hercules. Without a telescope and binoculars it is almost impossible to see. Through binoculars it looks like a bright spot. And if you take a telescope, you will see that the cluster consists of many stars. But for the spot to “break up” into stars, you need a telescope with a lens diameter of at least 70 mm - for example, Levenhuk Strike 90 PLUS with a 90 mm lens:

Moon. The most familiar object in the starry sky. Lunar seas and mountains (light and dark spots) are visible without any optical instruments. And lunar circuses and craters can be seen even with the simplest telescope:

Oddly enough, it is better to observe the moon not during the full moon, but in the first and last quarters. This is explained by the fact that the contrast of details on the surface of the Moon during a full moon is very small, and they are not visible.

Venus, the closest planet in the solar system to us, is also clearly visible in the night sky. It is the brightest object after the Sun and Moon. And through a telescope you can see other planets - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s rings will be visible, and even Uranus and Neptune. True, the most distant planets will be visible as small, rather dim stars.

The visibility of each space object depends not only on the time of day, but also on the time of year. However, the main factor is the observation location: city lighting obscures the light of stars and other objects. It is optimal to go out into nature. But if you have binoculars or a telescope in your hands, then you can see a lot of interesting things in the city.

Despite the gigantic distance to (amounting to 2.54 million light years), it still has a visible magnitude of 3.44 and a linear size of 3.167×1° in the starry sky, which allows it to be observed with the naked eye in the sky as a slightly oblong speck. This is achieved by the fact that Andromeda contains about a trillion stars (thus exceeding its size by at least 2.5 times and being the largest galaxy in the Local Group). However, despite the huge number of stars in it, it is still inferior in brightness to about 150 stars in both hemispheres of the starry sky.

Observation

The Andromeda Galaxy is located in the constellation of the same name, but it is best to start searching for it from the one that is easier to find and move through the constellations or.

Pegasus constellation : in this case, in the continuation of the constellation Pegasus, we will need to find Alferats (the brightest star of the Andromeda constellation) from which we need to move to Mirakh, from which we turn 90° and look for two other bright stars of this constellation. A little further on, the second of these stars will be Andromeda.

Constellation Cassiopeia : another way to find Andromeda also starts from the North Star, but in this case we should find the constellation Cassiopeia, which looks like the letter M or W in the sky, depending on its current position. On the continuation of the Polaris-Shedar line (the 2nd star on the right of this constellation), a little further than half the distance between them will be the Andromeda Galaxy.

Observation history

Since this galaxy is visible to the naked eye, the first mention of it dates back to 946 AD. But before the advent of modern multi-meter telescopes, it was impossible to distinguish individual stars in it, so the true nature of this object was hidden from observers under the guise of a small nebula in our galaxy. The first signs of its extragalactic origin were obtained through spectral analysis made in 1912 (it turned out that it was moving towards us at a speed of 300 km/s) and a supernova explosion recorded in 1917 (which gave the first approximate value of the distance to it - 500 thousand St. years). However, only Edwin Hubble managed to put a final point in the dispute between scientists.