“The enormous benefits of world science”: an astrophysicist on Russian space projects in 2020

- Space exploration today is primarily associated with major international projects. Can you give examples of such cooperation with the participation of our scientists?

- First of all, it is, of course, the Spectrum-X-ray-Gamma or Spectrum-RG space observatory, which was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in July of this year and is now working very successfully.

It installed the Russian ART-XC X-ray telescope and the eRosita X-ray telescope from Germany. In fact, each of these instruments consists of seven very sensitive X-ray telescopes operating in different ranges. Data from the observatory is received every day, sent to the Space Research Institute for processing and analysis.

In this project, the entire celestial sphere is divided exactly in half for Russian and German scientists, and there is absolutely equal cooperation. It is very important that Roscosmos brilliantly put this spacecraft into a given orbit, and the Lavochkin NGO now receives all the information and runs this program together with the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and ballistic centers. We have not had such successful scientific launches for basic astrophysical research for a long time.

- What is planned to be done at this observatory next year?

- On December 8, the observatory began a survey of the sky in X-rays, which will last four years. The sky is scanned in strips of one degree every four hours. During the review, about 200 thousand clusters of galaxies in which hot intergalactic gas shines in X-rays, about several million active nuclei of distant galaxies and quasars, will be discovered.

Also, transient, that is, flashing for a while, sources of X-rays of various nature, including those associated with tidal destruction of stars in the vicinity of supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies, will regularly open. These observations are very relevant for modern astrophysics and cosmology. Of course, lengthy data processing is required.

After the survey of the entire sky is over, the observatory telescopes will operate at the request of individual research groups in the guidance mode for individual sources.

• Scheme of the telescope "Spectrum-RG" with expanded solar panels
• © Roscosmos

- When will the first interim results appear?

- We are already getting results. Every second there is a continuous scanning of the sky, every day data from a satellite located at a distance of almost 1.5 million km from the Earth is transmitted to the Earth, so that the received data is processed almost in real time.

The sensitivity of the Spectra-RG survey by individual sources and in long-term exposures is 100 times greater than all existing sky surveys of this kind. As you know, in science, any increase in sensitivity by an order of magnitude always leads to completely new amazing discoveries. We all look forward to the results.

Pictures that have already been received are just some kind of fantasy! So, on a site measuring about 20 degrees in the X-ray range, thousands of sources are visible. And these are not only the stars of our Galaxy - the Milky Way, but also supermassive black holes in the nuclei of distant galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

- Konstantin Alexandrovich, are these fantastic images accessible to a wide audience?

- On the official website of the srg.cosmos.ru observatory, publicly available information is already posted. There are sky images taken at the verification stage when the satellite flew from the Earth to a given orbit and individual fields were taken.

- And in the near future will all Russian scientists have access to the data obtained? Or even astrophysicists from around the world?

- Right. A Russian consortium has been organized, which includes our leading scientists, as well as a similar consortium in Germany. As is customary in such large projects, these consortia regulate access to information in a certain way. However, after some time, all data will be open. All this will bring enormous benefits to world science, because such reviews of the whole sky simply did not exist.

• X-ray map of a portion of the galactic disk, the so-called ridge of the Galaxy, obtained by the eRosita telescope in October 2019
• © Press Center, IKI RAS

- In 2019, astrophysicists from Russia received the Dirac medal for researching the newborn universe. Another Russian team was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for solving the problem of registration of gravitational waves. And what can we expect from our researchers in 2020?

- As for 2019, we had another wonderful event. Gennady Borisov, an employee of our institute, discovered the first extragalactic comet. Many comets are discovered, but this one turned out to be unique - it is not gravitationally connected with the solar system. This discovery was completely unplanned. So in 2020, something completely surprising and unexpected may well happen.

It is necessary to mention the international space experiment with the leading Russian participation Radioastron, led by academician Nikolai Semenovich Kardashev. This project was completed last year after seven years of successful fundamental astrophysical research with the help of a radio telescope mounted on the Spectrum-R spacecraft (the first of four Spectrum-type spacecraft. - RT ).

The information that was obtained during this experiment continues to be processed. In the coming year, many important scientific results are expected.

- If we do not say about theoretical astrophysicists, then undeservedly ignore fundamental science. What surprises can await us in this area?

- We have a very strong theoretical school in the field of cosmology of the early Universe: academician Alexei Starobinsky and his colleagues at the Institute of Theoretical Physics named after L.D. Landau, academician Valery Rubakov and his group at the Institute for Nuclear Research and at the Physics Department of Moscow State University, high-energy astrophysics schools at the IKI RAS and the SAI of Moscow State University, theoretical schools at the AKP FIAN and the Institute of Astronomy of the RAS, at St. Petersburg and Kazan universities, as well as a lot others. All teams are active, and each of them can give significant results.

It is difficult to say when and in which particular area a breakthrough will happen. Take, for example, international collaborations on the detection of gravitational waves LIGO and Virgo (two scientific groups from Russia participate in the LIGO project . - RT). They now have dozens of candidate events registered, and they are all very interesting, but so far this information is closed to a wide circle of scientists. Processing data from gravitational-wave experiments requires a rather long time, several months of work of thousands of people on supercomputers. In 2020, new and possibly sensational publications are expected based on the observations of this year.

- More recently, scientists recorded three signals from the region of a possible merger of a black hole and a neutron star ...

“It looks like a coincidence.” The areas of localization of all these events are huge - tens, if not hundreds of square degrees. The time interval for recording these events is also quite large. From the point of view of physics, it is completely unclear what the neutrino event was that preceding the merger of two black holes (according to updated data from LIGO, on December 16, 2019, a surge of gravitational waves was recorded precisely from the merger of two black holes, and not a black hole and a neutron star, as assumed earlier. - RT ). But it will, of course, be very interesting if they prove that these events were somehow physically connected.

- The media recently reported that in Russia there will be a center for the detection of dangerous asteroids and that the project will begin, according to preliminary estimates, in mid-2020. How do you feel about such an initiative? Is there really a risk that we will not survive the next year due to some kind of asteroid there?

- Such world centers exist, so this cannot be called something completely new. Of course, you need to follow the famous and new celestial objects. From time to time, information appears that a potentially dangerous celestial body is approaching Earth, but this is more designed for resonance in the media, as is the case with the theme of climate change. An asteroid hazard, in principle, exists, but it is not very great. It is highly unlikely that in this regard next year will bring surprises.

Now a much bigger problem is not asteroids, but an incredible amount of space debris in the form of spent satellites, the remnants of launch vehicles and the like. Space ecology is a serious problem. In near-Earth space is becoming more and more such garbage. For some time they did not think about him, but now it became clear that it was impossible to live like that further and urgent measures needed to be taken. Both scientists and applied departments are working hard to solve this problem.

- What other questions may arise before our space scientific community in the near future?

- We are currently developing several large-scale space projects in Russia, including the launch of other spacecraft of the Spectrum series. The Spectrum-UV project is an ultraviolet telescope in space that will open up new possibilities for the study of exoplanets, stars, and the interstellar medium. This project is being developed at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is next in line after the successful launch of the Spectrum RG Observatory. Its launch will take place no earlier than 2025.

• Astrophysical Observatory "Spectrum-M"
• © JSC NPO Lavochkina

An even larger, but also more distant in time space project is Spektr-M, or Millimetron. It involves the introduction into orbit of the Sun-Earth system of a radio telescope operating in the millimeter range. It is supposed to be used to obtain images of space objects with ultra-high resolution.