Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS translation, dated 1 August 1990, is an article from the Soviet journal Kommunist by Leonid Grishchuk of the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. In it he argues that basic science needs state support. He notes that lecture audiences ask a lot about flying saucers and space aliens. He goes on to review cosmology, including galaxy structure, cosmic expansion, relic radiation, Fridman's models and inflationary theory. He closes by saying the question of non-Earth civilizations is a topic for another author.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 12 of 16 did not come easily either. Relatively recently, scientists presumed that the Sun was located near the center of our star system, our Galaxy, beyond the boundaries of which, possibly, there was nothing. Nothing was known for sure about the existence of any formations whatsoever beyond our own Galaxy. Only in the 1920s-1930s, thanks to rapid progress in the development of observation equipment, was it finally proven that there are a number of other stellar systems and galaxies outside our Galaxy. 11. Approximately in these years, it was discovered that the Sun is located in a by no means remarkable area, almost on the edge of our own disk-shaped Galaxy. (Looking at its basic mass of stars at night, we see the Milky Way in the sky.) 12. The understanding that things in space are not at all calm also came with difficulty. The stars are moving within the galaxies, and the galaxies are moving relative to each other. Explosive processes, releasing a tremendous amount of energy, often occur in space. 13. In the area of space accessible to modern optical and radio telescopes, many, many millions of galaxies are observed. Although they differ in terms of form, mass, and star content, they can be considered the basic structural units of the Universe. Galaxies are combined into groups, accumulations and structures on an even greater scale. In the distribution of a number of conglomerations, stretched and flat elements are being discovered, as well as great empty spaces where, with the achieved level of sensitivity of observation equipment, no galaxies at all are visible. Graphically speaking, the distribution of galaxies has a porous or net-like structure, i.e., the empty areas alternate with "'walls'" and "'threads,'" where the basic share of luminous matter is concentrated. The galaxies themselves are fairly flat and distinctly outlined formations, but as one moves to structures ever greater in scale, the outlines and localization of these structures become ever more vague. There is no designated place whatsoever in the distribution of these galaxies that could be considered the center of the Universe, and there is no designated direction whatsoever that could be considered an axis of symmetry for the Universe. On this grounds, we say that the observable Universe is homogeneous and isotropic. 14. The most distant of the observable objects is about 10 billion light-years away us. It is several light-years to the closest stars in our own galaxy. The intermediate distances could be described as follows: the diameter of our galaxy is almost 100,000 light-years. This number exceeds the distance to the nearest stars by a factor of several tens of thousands, and our galaxy is not one of the smaller ones. The dimension of the average concentration of galaxies is even larger, by a factor of 100, and may exceed tens of millions of light
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 12 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.