The speed of the solar system around the center of the galaxy. solar system

Surely, many of you have seen a gif or watched a video showing movement solar system.

Video clip, released in 2012, went viral and made a lot of noise. I came across him shortly after his appearance, when I knew much less about space than I do now. And most of all I was confused by the perpendicularity of the plane of the orbits of the planets to the direction of motion. It's not that it's impossible, but the Solar System can move at any angle to the plane of the Galaxy. You ask, why remember long-forgotten stories? The fact is that right now, with the desire and the presence of good weather, everyone can see in the sky the real angle between the planes of the ecliptic and the Galaxy.

We check scientists

Astronomy says that the angle between the planes of the ecliptic and the galaxy is 63°.

But the figure itself is boring, and even now, when adherents of the flat Earth are on the sidelines of science, I want to have a simple and clear illustration. Let's think about how we can see the planes of the Galaxy and the ecliptic in the sky, preferably with the naked eye and without moving far from the city? The plane of the galaxy is Milky Way, but now, with the abundance of light pollution, it is not so easy to see it. Is there any line approximately close to the plane of the Galaxy? Yes, it is the constellation Cygnus. It is clearly visible even in the city, and it is easy to find it, relying on bright stars: Deneb (alpha Cygnus), Vega (alpha Lyra) and Altair (alpha Eagle). The "trunk" of Cygnus approximately coincides with the galactic plane.

Okay, we have one plane. But how to get a visual line of the ecliptic? Let's think, what is the ecliptic in general? According to the modern strict definition, the ecliptic is a section of the celestial sphere by the plane of the orbit of the barycenter (center of mass) of the Earth-Moon. On the average, the Sun moves along the ecliptic, but we do not have two Suns, according to which it is convenient to draw a line, and the Cygnus constellation will not be visible in sunlight. But if we remember that the planets of the solar system also move approximately in the same plane, then it turns out that the parade of planets will just roughly show us the plane of the ecliptic. And now in the morning sky you can just see Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

As a result, in the coming weeks, in the morning before sunrise, it will be possible to very clearly see the following picture:

Which, surprisingly, is in perfect agreement with astronomy textbooks.

And it's better to draw a gif like this:

Source: astronomer Rhys Taylor website rhysy.net

The question can cause the relative position of the planes. Are we flying<-/ или же <-\ (если смотреть с внешней стороны Галактики, северный полюс вверху)? Астрономия говорит, что Солнечная система движется относительно ближайших звезд в направлении созвездия Геркулеса, в точку, расположенную недалеко от Веги и Альбирео (бета Лебедя), то есть правильное положение <-/.

But this fact, alas, cannot be verified "on the fingers", because, even though they did it two hundred and thirty-five years ago, they used the results of many years of astronomical observations and mathematics.

Receding stars

How can you generally determine where the solar system is moving relative to nearby stars? If we can record the movement of a star across the celestial sphere for decades, then the direction of movement of several stars will tell us where we are moving relative to them. Let's call the point to which we are moving apex. Stars that are not far from it, as well as from the opposite point (anti-apex), will move weakly, because they are flying towards us or away from us. And the farther the star is from the apex and anti-apex, the greater will be its own motion. Imagine that you are driving down the road. Traffic lights at intersections in front and behind will not shift much to the sides. But the lampposts along the road will flicker (have a large own movement) outside the window.

The gif shows the movement of Barnard's star, which has the largest proper motion. Already in the 18th century, astronomers had records of the position of stars over an interval of 40-50 years, which made it possible to determine the direction of motion of slower stars. Then the English astronomer William Herschel took the star catalogs and, without approaching the telescope, began to calculate. Already the first calculations according to Mayer's catalog showed that the stars do not move randomly, and the apex can be determined.

Source: Hoskin, M. Herschel's Determination of the Solar Apex, Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 11, P. 153, 1980

And with the data of the Lalande catalog, the area was significantly reduced.

From there

Then normal scientific work went on - data clarification, calculations, disputes, but Herschel used the correct principle and was only ten degrees wrong. Information is still being collected, for example, only thirty years ago, the speed of movement was reduced from 20 to 13 km / s. Important: this speed should not be confused with the speed of the solar system and other nearby stars relative to the center of the Galaxy, which is approximately 220 km/s.

Even further

Well, since we mentioned the speed of movement relative to the center of the Galaxy, it is necessary to understand here as well. The galactic north pole is chosen in the same way as the earth's - arbitrarily by agreement. It is located near the star Arcturus (alpha Bootes), approximately up in the direction of the wing of the constellation Cygnus. But in general, the projection of the constellations on the map of the Galaxy looks like this:

Those. The solar system moves relative to the center of the Galaxy in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, and relative to the local stars in the direction of the constellation Hercules, at an angle of 63 ° to the galactic plane,<-/, если смотреть с внешней стороны Галактики, северный полюс сверху.

space tail

But the comparison of the solar system with a comet in the video is absolutely correct. NASA's IBEX was specifically designed to determine the interaction between the boundary of the solar system and interstellar space. And according to him, there is a tail.

NASA illustration

For other stars, we can see the astrospheres (stellar wind bubbles) directly.

Photo by NASA

Positive in the end

Concluding the conversation, it is worth noting a very positive story. DJSadhu, who created the original video in 2012, originally promoted something unscientific. But, thanks to the viral distribution of the clip, he talked with real astronomers (astrophysicist Rhys Tailor speaks very positively about the dialogue) and, three years later, made a new video that is much more relevant to reality without anti-scientific constructions. The moon moves in orbit at a speed of 1 km per second. The Earth together with the Moon make a complete revolution around the Sun in 365 days at a speed of 108 thousand kilometers per hour or 30 kilometers per second.

Until quite recently, scientists were limited to such data. But with the invention of powerful telescopes, it became clear that the solar system is not limited to planets. It is much larger and extends over a distance of 100 thousand distances from the Earth to the Sun (astronomical). This is the region covered by the attraction of our star. It is named after astronomer Jan Oort, who proved its existence. The Oort Cloud is a world of icy comets periodically approaching the Sun, crossing the Earth's orbit. It is only beyond this cloud that the solar system ends and interstellar space begins.

Oort, also based on the radial velocities and proper motions of stars, substantiated the hypothesis of the movement of the galaxy around its center. Consequently, the Sun and its entire system, as a whole, together with all neighboring stars, moves in the galactic disk around a common center.

Thanks to the development of science, sufficiently powerful and accurate instruments appeared at the disposal of scientists, with the help of which they came closer and closer to unraveling the structure of the universe. It was possible to find out in what place of the Milky Way visible in the sky is its center. It ended up in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, hidden by dense dark clouds of gas and dust. If these clouds were not there, then a huge blurry white spot would be visible in the night sky, dozens of times larger than the Moon and of the same luminosity.

Modern refinements

The distance to the center of the galaxy turned out to be greater than expected. 26 thousand light years. This is a huge number. Launched in 1977, the Voyager satellite, which has just left the solar system, would reach the center of the galaxy in a billion years. Thanks to artificial satellites and mathematical calculations, it was possible to find out the trajectory of the solar system in the galaxy.

Today, the Sun is known to lie in a relatively quiet section of the Milky Way between the two large spiral arms of Perseus and Sagittarius and another, slightly smaller, arm of Orion. All of them are visible in the night sky as foggy streaks. Te - The outer spiral arm, the Karin arm, is only visible through powerful telescopes.

The sun, one might say, is lucky that it is located in a region where the influence of neighboring stars is not so great. Being in a spiral arm, it is possible that life would never have originated on Earth. But still the Sun does not move around the center of the galaxy in a straight line. The movement looks like a whirlwind: over time, it is closer to the arms, then further away. And thus it flies around the circumference of the galactic disk together with neighboring stars in 215 million years, at a speed of 230 km per second.

There is no such thing in life as eternal peace of mind. Life itself is a movement, and cannot exist without desires, fear, and feelings.
Thomas Hobbs

The reader asks:

I found a video on YouTube with a theory about the spiral movement of the solar system through our galaxy. It didn't strike me as convincing, but I'd like to hear it from you. Is it scientifically correct?

Let's watch the video first:

Some of the statements in this video are true. For example:

• planets revolve around the sun in approximately the same plane
• The solar system moves through the galaxy with a 60° angle between the galactic plane and the planetary rotation plane
• The sun, during its rotation around the Milky Way, moves up and down and in and out in relation to the rest of the galaxy

All this is true, but at the same time in the video all these facts are shown incorrectly.

It is known that the planets move around the Sun in ellipses, according to the laws of Kepler, Newton and Einstein. But the picture on the left is wrong in terms of scale. It is incorrect in terms of shapes, sizes and eccentricities. While the orbits on the right are less like ellipses in the diagram on the right, the orbits of the planets look something like this in terms of scale.

Let's take another example - the orbit of the moon.

It is known that the Moon revolves around the Earth with a period of just under a month, and the Earth revolves around the Sun with a period of 12 months. Which of the following pictures best demonstrates the movement of the Moon around the Sun? If we compare the distances from the Sun to the Earth and from the Earth to the Moon, as well as the speed of rotation of the Moon around the Earth, and the Earth / Moon system around the Sun, it turns out that option D demonstrates the best situation. They can be exaggerated to achieve some effects , but variants A, B and C are quantitatively incorrect.

Now let's move on to the movement of the solar system through the galaxy.

How many inaccuracies does it contain. First, all the planets at any given time are in the same plane. There is no lag that the planets more distant from the Sun would show in relation to the less distant ones.

Secondly, let's remember the real speeds of the planets. Mercury moves in our system faster than all the others, revolving around the Sun at a speed of 47 km / s. This is 60% faster than the orbital speed of the Earth, about 4 times faster than Jupiter, and 9 times faster than Neptune, which orbits at a speed of 5.4 km / s. And the Sun flies through the galaxy at a speed of 220 km/s.

In the time it takes Mercury to make one revolution, the entire solar system travels 1.7 billion kilometers in its intragalactic elliptical orbit. At the same time, the radius of Mercury's orbit is only 58 million kilometers, or only 3.4% of the distance that the entire solar system is advancing.

If we were to build the movement of the solar system through the galaxy on a scale, and look at how the planets move, we would see the following:

Imagine that the whole system - the Sun, the moon, all the planets, asteroids, comets - move at a high speed at an angle of about 60° relative to the plane of the solar system. Something like this:

Putting it all together, we get a more accurate picture:

What about precession? And what about the up-down and in-out vibrations? All this is true, but the video shows it in an overly exaggerated and misinterpreted way.

Indeed, the precession of the solar system occurs with a period of 26,000 years. But there is no spiral movement, neither in the Sun nor in the planets. The precession is carried out not by the orbits of the planets, but by the axis of rotation of the Earth.

The North Star is not permanently located directly above the North Pole. Most of the time we don't have a polar star. 3000 years ago, Kochab was closer to the pole than the North Star. In 5500 years, Alderamin will become the polar star. And in 12,000 years, Vega, the second brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere, will be only 2 degrees from the pole. But it is this that changes with a frequency of once every 26,000 years, and not the movement of the Sun or planets.

How about solar wind?

It's radiation coming from the Sun (and all the stars), not something we bump into as we move through the galaxy. Hot stars emit fast-moving charged particles. The boundary of the solar system passes where the solar wind no longer has the ability to repel the interstellar medium. There is the boundary of the heliosphere.

Now about moving up and down and in and out in relation to the galaxy.

Since the Sun and the Solar System are subject to gravity, it is she who dominates their movement. Now the Sun is located at a distance of 25-27 thousand light years from the center of the galaxy, and moves around it in an ellipse. At the same time, all other stars, gas, dust, move around the galaxy also along ellipses. And the ellipse of the Sun is different from all the others.

With a period of 220 million years, the Sun makes a complete revolution around the galaxy, passing slightly above and below the center of the galactic plane. But since the rest of the matter in the galaxy moves in the same way, the orientation of the galactic plane changes over time. We can move in an ellipse, but the galaxy is a rotating dish, so we move up and down it with a period of 63 million years, although our movement in and out occurs with a period of 220 million years.

But they do not make any “corkscrew” of the planet, their movement is distorted beyond recognition, the video incorrectly talks about precession and the solar wind, and the text is full of errors. The simulation is done very nicely, but it would be much prettier if it was right.

You are sitting, standing or lying down reading this article, and you do not feel that the Earth is rotating around its axis at a breakneck speed - about 1,700 km / h at the equator. However, the rotation speed doesn't seem all that fast when converted to km/s. It turns out 0.5 km / s - a barely noticeable flash on the radar, in comparison with other speeds around us.

Just like other planets in the solar system, the Earth revolves around the Sun. And in order to stay in its orbit, it moves at a speed of 30 km / s. Venus and Mercury, which are closer to the Sun, move faster, Mars, whose orbit passes the orbit of the Earth, moves much more slowly.

But even the Sun does not stand in one place. Our Milky Way galaxy is huge, massive and also mobile! All stars, planets, gas clouds, dust particles, black holes, dark matter - all this moves relative to a common center of mass.

According to scientists, the Sun is located at a distance of 25,000 light years from the center of our galaxy and moves in an elliptical orbit, making a complete revolution every 220-250 million years. It turns out that the speed of the Sun is about 200-220 km / s, which is hundreds of times higher than the speed of the Earth around its axis and tens of times higher than the speed of its movement around the Sun. This is what the movement of our solar system looks like.

Is the galaxy stationary? Again no. Giant space objects have a large mass, and therefore, create strong gravitational fields. Give the Universe a little time (and we had it - about 13.8 billion years), and everything will start moving in the direction of the greatest attraction. That is why the Universe is not homogeneous, but consists of galaxies and groups of galaxies.

What does this mean for us?

This means that the Milky Way is pulled towards itself by other galaxies and groups of galaxies located nearby. This means that massive objects dominate this process. And this means that not only our galaxy, but also all those around us are influenced by these "tractors". We are getting closer to understanding what happens to us in outer space, but we still lack facts, for example:

• what were the initial conditions under which the universe was born;
• how the various masses in the galaxy move and change over time;
• how the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies and clusters formed;
• and how it is happening now.

However, there is a trick that will help us figure it out.

The universe is filled with cosmic microwave background radiation with a temperature of 2.725 K, which has been preserved since the time of the Big Bang. In some places there are tiny deviations - about 100 μK, but the general temperature background is constant.

This is because the universe was formed in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago and is still expanding and cooling.

380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled to such a temperature that it became possible to form hydrogen atoms. Prior to this, photons constantly interacted with the rest of the plasma particles: they collided with them and exchanged energy. As the universe cools, there are fewer charged particles, and more space between them. Photons were able to move freely in space. Relic radiation is photons that were emitted by the plasma towards the future location of the Earth, but avoided scattering, since recombination has already begun. They reach the Earth through the space of the Universe, which continues to expand.

You can "see" this radiation yourself. The interference that occurs on an empty TV channel if you use a simple bunny-ear antenna is 1% due to CMB.

And yet the temperature of the background background is not the same in all directions. According to the results of the Planck mission research, the temperature differs somewhat in the opposite hemispheres of the celestial sphere: it is slightly higher in the areas of the sky south of the ecliptic - about 2.728 K, and lower in the other half - about 2.722 K.

Microwave background map made with the Planck telescope.

This difference is almost 100 times greater than the rest of the observed CMB temperature fluctuations, and this is misleading. Why is this happening? The answer is obvious - this difference is not due to fluctuations in the background radiation, it appears because there is movement!

When you approach a light source or it approaches you, the spectral lines in the spectrum of the source shift towards short waves (violet shift), when you move away from it or it moves away from you, the spectral lines shift towards long waves (red shift).

The relic radiation cannot be more or less energetic, which means we are moving through space. The Doppler effect helps to determine that our solar system is moving relative to the CMB at a speed of 368 ± 2 km/s, and the local group of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy, is moving at a speed of 627 ± 22 km/s relative to the CMB. These are the so-called peculiar velocities of galaxies, which are several hundred km/s. In addition to them, there are also cosmological velocities due to the expansion of the Universe and calculated according to the Hubble law.

Thanks to the residual radiation from the Big Bang, we can observe that everything in the universe is constantly moving and changing. And our galaxy is only a part of this process.

Universe (space)- this is the whole world around us, boundless in time and space and infinitely diverse in the forms that eternally moving matter takes. The boundlessness of the Universe can be partly imagined on a clear night with billions of different sizes of luminous flickering points in the sky, representing distant worlds. Rays of light at a speed of 300,000 km / s from the most distant parts of the universe reach the Earth in about 10 billion years.

According to scientists, the universe was formed as a result of the "Big Bang" 17 billion years ago.

It consists of clusters of stars, planets, cosmic dust and other cosmic bodies. These bodies form systems: planets with satellites (for example, the solar system), galaxies, metagalaxies (clusters of galaxies).

Galaxy(Late Greek galaktikos- milky, milky, from Greek gala- milk) is an extensive star system that consists of many stars, star clusters and associations, gas and dust nebulae, as well as individual atoms and particles scattered in interstellar space.

There are many galaxies in the universe of various sizes and shapes.

All stars visible from Earth are part of the Milky Way galaxy. It got its name due to the fact that most of the stars can be seen on a clear night in the form of the Milky Way - a whitish blurry band.

In total, the Milky Way Galaxy contains about 100 billion stars.

Our galaxy is in constant rotation. Its speed in the universe is 1.5 million km/h. If you look at our galaxy from its north pole, then the rotation occurs clockwise. The sun and the stars closest to it make a complete revolution around the center of the galaxy in 200 million years. This period is considered galactic year.

Similar in size and shape to the Milky Way galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, or the Andromeda Nebula, which is located at a distance of about 2 million light years from our galaxy. Light year- the distance traveled by light in a year, approximately equal to 10 13 km (the speed of light is 300,000 km / s).

To illustrate the study of the movement and location of stars, planets and other celestial bodies, the concept of the celestial sphere is used.

Rice. 1. The main lines of the celestial sphere

Celestial sphere is an imaginary sphere of arbitrarily large radius, in the center of which is the observer. Stars, the Sun, the Moon, planets are projected onto the celestial sphere.

The most important lines on the celestial sphere are: a plumb line, zenith, nadir, celestial equator, ecliptic, celestial meridian, etc. (Fig. 1).

plumb line- a straight line passing through the center of the celestial sphere and coinciding with the direction of the plumb line at the point of observation. For an observer on the surface of the Earth, a plumb line passes through the center of the Earth and the point of observation.

The plumb line intersects with the surface of the celestial sphere at two points - zenith, over the observer's head, and nadire - diametrically opposite point.

The great circle of the celestial sphere, the plane of which is perpendicular to the plumb line, is called mathematical horizon. It divides the surface of the celestial sphere into two halves: visible to the observer, with the apex at the zenith, and invisible, with the apex at the nadir.

The diameter around which the celestial sphere rotates is axis of the world. It intersects with the surface of the celestial sphere at two points - north pole of the world And south pole of the world. The North Pole is the one from which the rotation of the celestial sphere occurs clockwise, if you look at the sphere from the outside.

The great circle of the celestial sphere, whose plane is perpendicular to the axis of the world, is called celestial equator. It divides the surface of the celestial sphere into two hemispheres: northern, with a peak at the north celestial pole, and south, with a peak at the south celestial pole.

The great circle of the celestial sphere, the plane of which passes through the plumb line and the axis of the world, is the celestial meridian. It divides the surface of the celestial sphere into two hemispheres - eastern And western.

The line of intersection of the plane of the celestial meridian and the plane of the mathematical horizon - noon line.

Ecliptic(from Greek. ekieipsis- Eclipse) - a large circle of the celestial sphere, along which the apparent annual movement of the Sun, or rather, its center, occurs.

The plane of the ecliptic is inclined to the plane of the celestial equator at an angle of 23°26"21".

To make it easier to remember the location of the stars in the sky, people in antiquity came up with the idea of ​​combining the brightest of them into constellations.

Currently, 88 constellations are known that bear the names of mythical characters (Hercules, Pegasus, etc.), zodiac signs (Taurus, Pisces, Cancer, etc.), objects (Libra, Lyra, etc.) (Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Summer-autumn constellations

Origin of galaxies. The solar system and its individual planets still remains an unsolved mystery of nature. There are several hypotheses. It is currently believed that our galaxy formed from a gas cloud composed of hydrogen. At the initial stage of the evolution of the galaxy, the first stars formed from the interstellar gas-dust medium, and 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system.

Composition of the solar system

The set of celestial bodies moving around the Sun as a central body forms solar system. It is located almost on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy. The solar system is involved in rotation around the center of the galaxy. The speed of its movement is about 220 km / s. This movement occurs in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.

The composition of the solar system can be represented in the form of a simplified diagram shown in fig. 3.

Over 99.9% of the mass of the matter of the solar system falls on the Sun and only 0.1% - on all its other elements.

Hypothesis of I. Kant (1775) - P. Laplace (1796)	Hypothesis of D. Jeans (early 20th century)	Hypothesis of Academician O.P. Schmidt (40s of XX century)	Hypothesis of a Calemic V. G. Fesenkov (30s of XX century)
The planets were formed from gas-dust matter (in the form of a hot nebula). Cooling is accompanied by compression and an increase in the speed of rotation of some axis. Rings appeared at the equator of the nebula. The substance of the rings collected in red-hot bodies and gradually cooled down.	A larger star once passed by the Sun, and gravity pulled out a jet of hot substance (a prominence) from the Sun. Condensations formed, from which later - planets	The gas-dust cloud revolving around the Sun should have taken a solid shape as a result of the collision of particles and their movement. Particles coalesced into clusters. The attraction of smaller particles by clumps should have contributed to the growth of the surrounding matter. The orbits of the clumps should have become almost circular and lying almost in the same plane. Condensations were the embryos of the planets, absorbing almost all the matter from the gaps between their orbits.	The Sun itself arose from a rotating cloud, and the planets from secondary condensations in this cloud. Further, the Sun greatly decreased and cooled to its present state.

Rice. 3. Composition of the solar systems

Sun

Sun is a star, a giant hot ball. Its diameter is 109 times the diameter of the Earth, its mass is 330,000 times the mass of the Earth, but the average density is low - only 1.4 times the density of water. The sun is located at a distance of about 26,000 light years from the center of our galaxy and revolves around it, making one revolution in about 225-250 million years. The orbital speed of the Sun is 217 km/s, so it travels one light year in 1400 Earth years.

Rice. 4. The chemical composition of the Sun

The pressure on the Sun is 200 billion times higher than at the surface of the Earth. The density of solar matter and pressure rapidly increase in depth; the increase in pressure is explained by the weight of all overlying layers. The temperature on the surface of the Sun is 6000 K, and inside it is 13,500,000 K. The characteristic lifetime of a star like the Sun is 10 billion years.

Table 1. General information about the Sun

The chemical composition of the Sun is about the same as that of most other stars: about 75% is hydrogen, 25% is helium, and less than 1% is all other chemical elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) (Fig. 4 ).

The central part of the Sun with a radius of approximately 150,000 km is called solar core. This is a nuclear reaction zone. The density of matter here is about 150 times higher than the density of water. The temperature exceeds 10 million K (on the Kelvin scale, in terms of degrees Celsius 1 ° C \u003d K - 273.1) (Fig. 5).

Above the core, at distances of about 0.2-0.7 of the radius of the Sun from its center, there is radiant energy transfer zone. Energy transfer here is carried out by absorption and emission of photons by individual layers of particles (see Fig. 5).

Rice. 5. Structure of the Sun

Photon(from Greek. phos- light), an elementary particle that can exist only by moving at the speed of light.

Closer to the surface of the Sun, vortex mixing of the plasma occurs, and the energy transfer to the surface occurs

predominantly by the movements of the substance itself. This type of energy transfer is called convection and the layer of the Sun, where it occurs, - convective zone. The thickness of this layer is approximately 200,000 km.

Above the convective zone is the solar atmosphere, which is constantly fluctuating. Both vertical and horizontal waves with lengths of several thousand kilometers propagate here. The oscillations occur with a period of about five minutes.

The inner layer of the sun's atmosphere is called photosphere. It consists of light bubbles. This granules. Their dimensions are small - 1000-2000 km, and the distance between them is 300-600 km. About a million granules can be simultaneously observed on the Sun, each of which exists for several minutes. The granules are surrounded by dark spaces. If the substance rises in the granules, then around them it falls. The granules create a general background against which one can observe such large-scale formations as torches, sunspots, prominences, etc.

sunspots- dark areas on the Sun, the temperature of which is lowered compared to the surrounding space.

solar torches called the bright fields surrounding sunspots.

prominences(from lat. protubero- I swell) - dense condensations of relatively cold (compared to the ambient temperature) matter that rise and are held above the surface of the Sun by a magnetic field. The origin of the magnetic field of the Sun can be caused by the fact that different layers of the Sun rotate at different speeds: the inner parts rotate faster; the core rotates especially fast.

Prominences, sunspots, and flares are not the only examples of solar activity. It also includes magnetic storms and explosions, which are called flashes.

Above the photosphere is chromosphere is the outer shell of the sun. The origin of the name of this part of the solar atmosphere is associated with its reddish color. The thickness of the chromosphere is 10-15 thousand km, and the density of matter is hundreds of thousands of times less than in the photosphere. The temperature in the chromosphere is growing rapidly, reaching tens of thousands of degrees in its upper layers. At the edge of the chromosphere are observed spicules, which are elongated columns of compacted luminous gas. The temperature of these jets is higher than the temperature of the photosphere. Spicules first rise from the lower chromosphere by 5000-10000 km, and then fall back, where they fade. All this happens at a speed of about 20,000 m/s. Spikula lives 5-10 minutes. The number of spicules existing on the Sun at the same time is about a million (Fig. 6).

Rice. 6. The structure of the outer layers of the Sun

The chromosphere surrounds solar corona is the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere.

The total amount of energy radiated by the Sun is 3.86. 1026 W, and only one two billionth of this energy is received by the Earth.

Solar radiation includes corpuscular And electromagnetic radiation.Corpuscular fundamental radiation- this is a plasma stream, which consists of protons and neutrons, or in other words - sunny wind, which reaches near-Earth space and flows around the entire Earth's magnetosphere. electromagnetic radiation is the radiant energy of the sun. It reaches the earth's surface in the form of direct and scattered radiation and provides a thermal regime on our planet.

In the middle of the XIX century. Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf(1816-1893) (Fig. 7) calculated a quantitative indicator of solar activity, known throughout the world as the Wolf number. Having processed the data on observations of sunspots accumulated by the middle of the last century, Wolf was able to establish the average 1-year cycle of solar activity. In fact, the time intervals between years of maximum or minimum Wolf numbers range from 7 to 17 years. Simultaneously with the 11-year cycle, a secular, more precisely 80-90-year cycle of solar activity takes place. Inconsistently superimposed on each other, they make noticeable changes in the processes taking place in the geographic envelope of the Earth.

A. L. Chizhevsky (1897-1964) (Fig. 8) pointed out the close connection of many terrestrial phenomena with solar activity back in 1936, who wrote that the vast majority of physical and chemical processes on Earth are the result of the influence of cosmic forces. He was also one of the founders of such a science as heliobiology(from Greek. helios- the sun), studying the influence of the Sun on the living substance of the geographic shell of the Earth.

Depending on solar activity, such physical phenomena occur on Earth, such as: magnetic storms, the frequency of auroras, the amount of ultraviolet radiation, the intensity of thunderstorm activity, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, the level of lakes, rivers, groundwater, salinity and efficiency of the seas and others

The life of plants and animals is associated with the periodic activity of the Sun (there is a correlation between the solar cycle and the period of the growing season in plants, the reproduction and migration of birds, rodents, etc.), as well as humans (diseases).

At present, the relationship between solar and terrestrial processes continues to be studied with the help of artificial Earth satellites.

terrestrial planets

In addition to the Sun, planets are distinguished in the Solar System (Fig. 9).

By size, geographical indicators and chemical composition, the planets are divided into two groups: terrestrial planets And giant planets. The terrestrial planets include, and. They will be discussed in this subsection.

Rice. 9. Planets of the solar system

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. A separate section will be devoted to it.

Let's summarize. The density of the matter of the planet depends on the location of the planet in the solar system, and, taking into account its size, the mass. How
The closer the planet is to the Sun, the higher its average density of matter. For example, for Mercury it is 5.42 g/cm2, Venus - 5.25, Earth - 5.25, Mars - 3.97 g/cm 3 .

The general characteristics of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) are primarily: 1) relatively small sizes; 2) high temperatures on the surface; and 3) high density of planet matter. These planets rotate relatively slowly on their axis and have few or no satellites. In the structure of the planets of the terrestrial group, four main shells are distinguished: 1) a dense core; 2) the mantle covering it; 3) bark; 4) light gas-water shell (excluding Mercury). Traces of tectonic activity have been found on the surface of these planets.

giant planets

Now let's get acquainted with the giant planets, which are also included in our solar system. This , .

Giant planets have the following general characteristics: 1) large size and mass; 2) quickly rotate around an axis; 3) have rings, many satellites; 4) the atmosphere consists mainly of hydrogen and helium; 5) have a hot core of metals and silicates in the center.

They are also distinguished by: 1) low surface temperatures; 2) low density of matter of the planets.