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.
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Document 12 of 16 18. During expansion, the average density of matter decreases and, consequently, it was denser and hotter in the pre-galactic epoch. It is possible to say with certainty that 10-20 billion years ago the Universe was not at all like that which we now observe. This conclusion is persuasively confirmed by the existence of the so-called relic radiation, discovered using radio telescopes in 1965. It is distinguished from the radiation of isolated objects by the fact that it comes not from separate sources, but from all directions, uniformly filling the entire celestial sphere. Its temperature is about three degrees on the absolute scale. The properties of this radiation are identical everywhere, regardless of at which point in the sky the instruments are aimed. Only slight variations in temperature have been discovered, on the level of a tenth of a percent, caused by the movement of the Sun and Earth relative to the background of this radiation. In the direction in which the Solar System is moving, the temperature is slightly greater, and in the opposite direction--slightly below average. The relic radiation could not have been created by the activity of individual stars and galaxies, but remains as a trace (relic) from the pre-galactic epoch. In this epoch, the average density of matter was greater by a factor of billions, and the temperature of radiation was greater than it is now by a factor of a thousand. During the expansion of pre-galactic matter, the relic radiation cooled down and its temperature decreased to the value now observed. Due to gravitational instability, slight heterogeneities developed in the matter itself, which finally led to the formation of separate objects and the now-observed structures in the distribution of galaxies and conglomerations of them. 19. The idea that pre-galactic matter was quite homogeneous is confirmed by the high degree of similarity of the temperature of the relic radiation on all angular scales. It should be recalled that light and radio waves, which give the basic observational information about the Universe, travel at a finite velocity, the speed of light. Therefore, the further away their source is located, the earlier the stage of existence at which we see it. To put it figuratively, in observing a source, far from us at a great distance, we are looking into the past. Relic radiation covers tremendous distances, spreading virtually without absorption or dispersion. It actively interacted only with the primary pre-galactic plasma, after which it began to spread freely. If there had been significant variations in density and temperature in pre-galactic matter, right now the observed temperature distribution would be heterogeneous and 'spotty.' 20. Yet another set of observed information, an important component part of our concepts about the contemporary and early Universe, concerns the chemical make-up of the matter surrounding us. The most
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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.