One of the most erudite astronomers on the planet claims: from one galaxy, we can almost instantly move to another. It is only necessary to find the "wormhole" connecting them.
Stavropol journalists are incredibly lucky. Now they know more about the universe than other Russians. The fact is that a new stellar observatory is being created on the Shadzhatmaz plateau, three dozen kilometers from Kislovodsk, which will be commissioned in 2010. Director of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute (GAISh) Anatoly Cherepashchuk, together with a group of leading Russian scientists, visited the facility under construction. Scientists have kindly agreed to hold a small but very capacious press conference for the press on the most vibrant questions of the universe.
“The most interesting event that we, professional astronomers, are now expecting is the discovery of extraterrestrial life,” Anatoly Cherepashchuk said. - It is ripe, because our capabilities have increased greatly, the power of telescopes has increased tremendously.
According to the academician, life within the solar system can exist either on Mars or on the satellites of major planets. As for Mars, whole oceans of frozen water have been discovered under the topsoil. Billions of years ago, Mars had a dense enough atmosphere and living organisms could exist, says A. Cherepashchuk.
The search for their fossil remains, apparently, in the near future and will be engaged in Martian missions.
Much more promising in terms of searching for extraterrestrial life are satellites of giant planets. More than fifty of them have already been discovered on Saturn, and three dozen on Jupiter. These planets are several times farther from the Sun than the Earth, which means that severe cold reigns there. What kind of life can we talk about here? But it turns out that our star is by no means the only source of heat. Many satellites of the planets move in an elliptical orbit. Under the influence of gravity, their deformation occurs, the particles rub against each other and generate heat. For example, the temperature on the surface of Io, the moon of Jupiter, is +390.
The matter is small: to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, it is necessary to take samples of soil and water on Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa. But launching spaceships from Earth to distant planets and satellites is too expensive. However, we have the Moon by our side, where the force of gravity is six times less and from where it is much easier to start. And the institute headed by A. Cherepashchuk is now closely engaged in this - within the framework of a joint project with the Americans.
Academician Cherepashchuk is a recognized expert on "black holes" in the Universe. These are objects of incredible density, the gravitational field of which does not even release light. For clarity, we can say that the "black hole" the size of a point from a ballpoint pen is several times more massive than our Sun. But if there are "black holes", then there must be "wormholes", - Anatoly Mikhailovich is convinced.
It's just that "black holes" are formed from baryonic matter, that is, from ordinary molecules, atoms. And if we compress a substance with negative pressure, such as "dark energy", then we get "wormholes." You can enter the "black hole", but you can't get out. You find yourself in a gravitational grave. But inside the "wormhole" you can move freely, and very quickly. In particular, one can get from one galaxy to another, hundreds of millions of light years away from it, literally in a second. To realize the grandioseness of the perspective drawn by A. Cherepashchuk, let's try to imagine the scale of the Universe.
In order not to go crazy with the number of zeros, astronomers measure the universe not in kilometers, but in light years. This is the distance that light, moving at a speed of 300 thousand kilometers per second, overcomes in one year. That is about 10,000 billion kilometers. So: from the Earth to the Sun only eight light minutes. The nearest galaxy to our Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, is already 200,000 light years away. And, say, to the Cygnus radio galaxy - 600,000,000 light years! And here, come on, one of the most erudite astronomers of the planet claims: from one galaxy we can almost instantly move to another. It is only necessary to find the "wormhole" connecting them.
Today hundreds of serious astronomers, dozens of scientific centers around the world are engaged in the search for "wormholes". After all, materials with anti-gravity properties, from which "wormholes" can be formed, have already been discovered, but …
“We are not yet able to form a“wormhole”in laboratory conditions,” the academician admits. - However, it is possible that at the time of the formation of the Universe, "wormholes" appeared as corridors in space-time and that they still exist between certain objects. There is nothing surprising in the fact that it has not yet been possible to artificially form or detect the "wormholes" existing in the Universe. After all, about the “dark energy” itself, from which “wormholes” are probably formed, as well as about “dark matter”, we only know that they exist. And they do not just exist, but make up 95 percent of the mass of our Universe. But we know almost nothing about their nature! It is not so easy to realize this. Whatever we do, in each case we will be dealing with molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, waves, etc.
"Dark matter" is a substance consisting of unknown elementary particles that can expand, contract, and clump together. It does not radiate anything, since it does not possess the properties of electromagnetic interaction, but it gravitationally attracts, and thus manifests itself. So far, this is all that is known about this substance. An even more mysterious and significant substance is “dark energy”. This is a kind of environment, a field that penetrates everything, including you and me, and is evenly distributed in space. It accounts for 70 percent of the total energy in our universe. But most importantly, "dark energy" has the property of antigravity. Astronomers "caught" her on this. They found that the longer the universe expands, the more the expansion rate increases.
Although it should have been the other way around. After the Big Bang, which gave birth to our Universe 14 billion years ago, by inertia it rapidly expanded for some time, and then, under the influence of its own gravity, the expansion rate should have steadily decreased. There was only one explanation for the accelerated expansion: there is a force that "pushes" the Universe. They began to look for her and found "dark energy". For physicists now, this is the biggest mystery. They experiment, spend billions of dollars to figure out the nature of "dark energy." But nothing is clear yet.
It is impossible to imagine, but it is a fact that almost all pundits agree with: 14 billion years ago, all matter, all time and space of our Universe were enclosed in a point twenty orders of magnitude smaller than the atomic nucleus. What happened after, as a result of the Big Bang, this point began to expand with monstrous rapidity, scientists more or less clear: recombination, in which radiation is separated from matter; formation of the structure of galaxies and galactic clusters; the emergence of first generation stars; the formation of heavy elements and so on … But about what happened before the Big Bang, only a few of the serious scientists dare to speak. A. Cherepashchuk is one of them.
- Before the Big Bang, most likely, there was also matter, but the forms of its existence were completely different, - Anatoly Mikhailovich believes. - In our Universe at the moment of the Big Bang, a four-dimensional form of the existence of matter was formed: three coordinates of space and time. Since we are part of this Universe, we cannot go out into another dimension in order to look at it from the outside. However, it is possible that matter can exist in other forms, about which we know nothing. According to modern cosmologists, the instability of the scalar field, a certain initial state of our Universe, led to the Big Bang. At the moment of the birth of this instability, matter was formed, which possessed the property of gravitational repulsion. It is similar to that "dark energy" that makes our Universe expand rapidly,but only its density was much greater. Due to this repulsion, the Big Bang happened. The modern theory says that there have been many such Big Bangs in the Universe, that in addition to our Universe, there are many other worlds with different properties. This allows some researchers to move from a strong anthropic principle of the formation of our Universe to a weak one. In our Universe, physical constants and physical laws are "organized" so that they are conducive to human existence. This allows some researchers to move from a strong anthropic principle of the formation of our Universe to a weak one. In our Universe, physical constants and physical laws are "organized" so that they are conducive to human existence. This allows some researchers to move from a strong anthropic principle of the formation of our Universe to a weak one. In our Universe, physical constants and physical laws are "organized" so that they are conducive to human existence.
- It has been established that our universe is most likely infinite. Under the influence of "dark energy" it will expand to a state with a very low density, - says A. Cherepashchuk. - And then everything depends on the rate of expansion, which is determined by the equation of state of "dark energy". If the coefficient between pressure and energy density is equal to minus one, then this is a vacuum, and, therefore, the expansion will occur indefinitely. If it turns out to be less than minus one, then this is no longer a vacuum, but a quintessence: the expansion will occur for a finite time. If the coefficient between pressure and energy density turns out to be greater than minus one, then this is phantom energy: first, the Universe will expand rapidly, then the elements of the human body will rapidly expand, then molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons. And in the endbecause of this accelerated expansion, the entire universe will turn into radiation. If the beginning of our Universe was laid by the Big Bang, then its possible end was called the Big Rip.
- If 14 billion years ago, at the time of the formation of the Universe, a different ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass had arisen, then there would be no atoms, including carbon atoms, of which organic life consists. And other constants of our world seem to have been specially selected so that a person exists, - A. Cherepashchuk admits. This discovery was called the anthropic principle. Proceeding from it, apologists of various religions hastened to draw a conclusion: they say, it was God who created the conditions for human life. But there is also a theory of the weak anthropic principle, which A. Cherepashchuk adheres to:
- I believe in the natural origin of the Universe, in the fact that it was formed spontaneously, as a result of the instability of the scalar field. Somewhere in other points of space-time, other Universes were formed. Probably, the physical constants there are such that a person cannot exist. Somewhere it thickened and took the form of stars, planets, people, objects. Somewhere it exists in the form of interstellar gas, in which there is one atom of matter per cubic centimeter of space (this is hundreds of billions of times less than in the air we breathe). As the outstanding cosmologist from our institute Abram Zelmanov said, other Universes develop without witnesses, and in this Universe we are witnesses.
However, out of 14 billion years of development of our Universe, only the last 40 thousand years it has a witness - Homo sapiens. So we comprehend the entire previous history of the world only with our own mind. So man, most likely, will not be destined to see the death of the Universe with his own eyes. But he is already trying to penetrate his mind billions of years ahead, to present a picture incomparably more majestic and tragic than the biblical Apocalypse.