Secrets of the Apocalypse. Igor Prokopenko - secrets of the Apocalypse Igor Stanislavovich ProkopenkoSecrets of the Apocalypse

24.06.202327.05.2017

Igor Stanislavovich Prokopenko

Secrets of the Apocalypse

© Alexei Varfolomeev, Evgeny Kozyrev, Sergei Pyatakov, Zorikto Dagbaev, Boris Prikhodko, Nikolai Zaitsev, Abdula Magomedov, Mikhail Klimentiev, Ilya Pitalev, Vyacheslav Reutov, Voldemar Maask, Vladimir Sergeev, Grigory Sysoev, Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the Rostov Region, Press Service of the OJSC Uralkali / RIA Novosti

Infographics © RIA Novosti

Foreword

Why do planes crash, ships sink, cars crash on the roads? We are told that the human factor is to blame. That is, the person himself was mistaken, with whom it does not happen. However, is everything so unambiguous in our modern world? Let's see, for example, if you were told thirty years ago that with one button in one second you could send a letter to the ends of the world, you would say: fairy tales. And today, sending a text message to Australia is not a fairy tale, but just a simple household convenience.

And here lies a great and insidious delusion. Because all this is not invented at all so that we send stupid pictures to the other side of the world. Global network! Today it is redrawing the political map. Overnight creates world-famous persons and just as easily sends them to the dustbin of history. But what is the price for these unprecedented flowers of progress? She will be cruel.

One more disturbing than the other, scientists put forward hypotheses that artificial intelligence is more likely to destroy humanity, considering you and me an unnecessary ballast of the planet, and megatons of poison that we produce in pursuit of cheap goods will complete the man-made apocalypse! What does science think about the imminent end of the world? What are the alternative points of view about the death of the Earth?

A shocking prediction was recently made by renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking. Having summed up all the information about the reality around us, he mathematically calculated that our human civilization is doomed.

It will inevitably perish, and already in this millennium.

However, the fault of the earthly apocalypse will not be a crazy asteroid that astronomers scare us with, and not the solar wind, and not a new ice age, but man himself. And there is no exaggeration in this. The ability of modern humanity to self-destruct today has approached that fatal line, beyond which - no matter what actions a person performs - he will inevitably end up in the cemetery of history.

What should we, the sinful inhabitants of the Earth, really be afraid of, and what horror stories should we ignore? To answer this question, we sorted out all the threats to humanity, separated scientific from anti-scientific, scary from funny, real from potential, and we got this book. This is the result of the work of the creative team of the TV program "The Most Shocking Hypotheses". Hope you enjoy!

Space disasters

1. Galaxy Eaters

The Great Attractor is pulling in our galaxy – this gigantic gravitational force became known not so long ago. But most importantly, our Milky Way finds itself in a kind of cosmic funnel - at the same time, antigravity acts on it, it is caused by dark energy. And there is nothing mystical about this - the Nobel Prize has already been received for the discovery of such a property of the Universe.

Dark energy not only occupies a large part of outer space, but also stretches it. Everything that exists in the Universe is moving away from each other, antigravity forces are defeating the well-known forces of attraction, thanks to which we safely move on foot on our planet, and do not fly away from it. But this is for now - what will happen next with us, with the Earth, the Solar system, given that scientists have already calculated the possible options, the most likely of them - the Rupture of the Universe? The shocking assumption of astrophysicists already finds a lot of evidence.

Right now one of the galaxies is dying in space. Stripes of gas and stars remain from it, it is torn apart by one of the most gigantic structures of the Universe - the Great Attractor.

The same threatens our Milky Way: we are rushing through the Universe towards this Great Attractor. It draws us and our neighboring galaxies into its funnel, soon this cosmic colossus will swallow the entire solar system, including the Earth.

Mikhail Savrov, assistant professor of general physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, says that the mass of this giant is more than a million times the mass of galaxies like ours. That is, if there are a billion stars in our Galaxy, there are, respectively, a million billion or even more. And they also suggest that this is a mass of only visible stars - it is even difficult for us to imagine such gigantic sizes. Apparently, this Great Attractor is the largest cluster of stars of this kind, a supercluster close to us.

Astronomers named this supercluster of galaxies appropriately: from the English word attraction - “gravity”, - they also talk about it as the center of gravity of the Universe.

Alexander Ivanchik, professor at the Department of Space Research at St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, believes that this is the most powerful gravitational formation in which the most galaxies are formed - this can be called a gravitational knot.

A galaxy called ESO 137-001, which is now in its near-death stage, was pulled towards itself by the Great Attractor at a speed of about 7 million kilometers per hour. Incredible power even by space standards!

We learned about the existence of a giant gravitational funnel recently. Observations showed that our galaxy is heading somewhere, but what kind of source of attraction it was - one could only guess. That part of the Universe where the Great Attractor is located is very difficult to explore even with the most advanced telescopes today.

Yes, that's right, the main intrigue with this Great Attractor is that it was discovered recently. Why? Because it is located just in the galactic plane. That is, if we look at the sky, there are stars, stars, stars everywhere, and in one place there is such a foggy strip - the Milky Way. This is the plane of our Galaxy - and if we look into this plane, then the stars block the angle of view not only of the eye, but also of the most powerful telescopes, and nothing is visible in that direction.

But astronomers were lucky and still managed to look behind the stellar-dust curtain that covers the Great Attractor from us, and now the attention of scientists to it is increased. This gravitational funnel is interesting, but - the main thing! - dangerous because it is closest to us.

Sergei Rubin, a professor at the MEPhI Nuclear Research University, emphasizes that this is indeed the largest cluster of galaxies, and therefore the gravitational forces there are huge. At the same time, there is an opinion that our galaxy is torn apart by this Attractor.

This is the tearing that the Hubble telescope recorded. The galaxy fell into the thick of gravitational forces - it was captured by the attraction of the center of the Great Attractor called Abell 3627. Judging by the photographs of the telescope camera, the unfortunate one is already torn to pieces.

Powerful gravitational fields simply pull gas out of it. What will it lead to? To the fact that, having passed through this zone of attraction, through a strong gravitational field, the galaxy will come out of there already without gas, that is, with its stars that are now, but new stars will no longer be formed.

Without new stars, the galaxy will gradually die. What will happen to our Milky Way when it approaches the Great Attractor?!

Perhaps a catastrophe can be avoided - recently new calculations of the motion of our galaxy relative to the Great Attractor were presented. We slowed down! The speed is not 600 kilometers per second, as previously thought, but a third less. What is going on? As it turned out, the Milky Way galaxy and its neighbors are pulled away by another powerful force, scientists called it dark energy - it causes an accelerated expansion of the Universe, that is, galaxies do not attract, but move away.

Graphical representation of the two neighboring galaxies of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy

Vyacheslav Dokuchaev, a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, reports that now all physicists, including astronomers, are excited about the study of this new phenomenon, because this thing is absolutely mysterious. What is the mystery? After all, something must cause this accelerated expansion - it turns out that this is done by dark energy, which would be more correctly called a dark field.

The laws of attraction and gravity known until now change in space to anti-gravity. This is a discovery for which a Nobel Prize was recently awarded!

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© Alexei Varfolomeev, Evgeny Kozyrev, Sergei Pyatakov, Zorikto Dagbaev, Boris Prikhodko, Nikolai Zaitsev, Abdula Magomedov, Mikhail Klimentiev, Ilya Pitalev, Vyacheslav Reutov, Voldemar Maask, Vladimir Sergeev, Grigory Sysoev, Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the Rostov Region, Press Service of the OJSC Uralkali / RIA Novosti

Infographics © RIA Novosti

Foreword

It will inevitably perish, and already in this millennium.

This is the result of the work of the creative team of the TV program "The Most Shocking Hypotheses". Hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1
Space disasters

1. Galaxy Eaters

Right now one of the galaxies is dying in space. Stripes of gas and stars remain from it, it is torn apart by one of the most gigantic structures of the Universe - the Great Attractor.

Astronomers named this supercluster of galaxies appropriately: from the English word attraction - “gravity”, - they also talk about it as the center of gravity of the Universe.

Without new stars, the galaxy will gradually die. What will happen to our Milky Way when it approaches the Great Attractor?!

Graphical representation of the two neighboring galaxies of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy

The laws of attraction and gravity known until now change in space to anti-gravity. This is a discovery for which a Nobel Prize was recently awarded!

Previously, scientists believed that there is only gravity, due to which planets rotate, comets fly, stars and galaxies form. And now it turns out that anti-gravity rules the world on the largest scale!

The discovery of American astronomers who received the Nobel Prize really shows the life of the Universe in a completely different way. This also applies to its origin, evolution, future! But the most important thing: it becomes clear that right now the cosmos is undergoing a global restructuring! And it directly concerns us: both our Galaxy, and the solar system, and the Earth.

Ordinary gravity, familiar to us on Earth, it attracts everything to everything. From this follows the law of universal gravitation, formulated by Newton, - two masses are attracted to each other. Now it has been established that dark energy creates forces that lead to the expansion of galaxies at large distances, and this expansion goes to everything else with acceleration. And we are now living just at the stage of this accelerated expansion of the Universe, in which this dark energy already dominates, 70 percent of it, and it just leads to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

70 percent of everything in our universe is dark energy! This is something that is not visible to the eye, not visible to the most powerful telescopes, but this is what controls the Universe!

Artur Chernin, chief researcher at the P.K. Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, says that this is a grandiose discovery - the largest recent discovery in astronomy and astrophysics, and even in general in all science, in the science of everything in the world. But we don't yet know what dark energy is made of.

The fact that the forces of attraction do not behave quite as they should in accordance with accepted physical laws was noticed when the Galileo research apparatus was sent to Jupiter in the late 1980s. Scientists acted as usual - to give the desired speed they used a "gravitational maneuver". The probe was brought closer to the Earth twice so that the planet's gravitational force pushed it and gave it additional acceleration. But a strange thing happened - after the maneuvers, the speed of the Galileo turned out to be higher than calculated. The same thing happened with the next three devices, and the scientists were confused, they could not explain in any way why the usual launch scheme was violated. Calculation errors? Technological failure? Or what kind of unknown "something" gives the probes extra acceleration? At that time, antigravity was not yet discussed among astronomers, the term "dark energy" did not exist, as well as the theory itself. But even now this phenomenon is a mystery for the researchers of the Universe, very little is known about it.

For this fundamental phenomenon of nature, even a corresponding name has not been invented - it is not known what it consists of, what it is.

Can dark energy already appear so close to us and make its own changes to the operation of spacecraft sent from Earth?

Model of the Hubble telescope

There is a six-meter telescope in the North Caucasus, it was the largest in the world for a long time, now it already has competitors, but it is still the most powerful among Russian ones. As soon as it became known about the existence of dark energy in the Universe, here, on this telescope, a group of astronomers began to study the phenomena associated with antigravity. But only not in outer space - information comes from there thanks to the famous Hubble telescope, but in the near environment - inside our Galaxy. And the results of this study are amazing! The Russian telescope gave information, without exaggeration, shocking - dark energy is around us!

Scientists have seen the effects of anti-gravity, the effects, as they are expressed, of Einstein's worldwide anti-gravity not far from us. And out of this a certain new concept arises - the concept of local dark energy. This dark local energy was discovered here, in Russia, in the North Caucasus.

Does this mean that the gravity that keeps us - people and everything else near the surface of the Earth - will be replaced by anti-gravity? Will this mysterious dark energy work here, about which it is already known for sure that it violated all the known and valid laws of cosmic attraction until that time?

It is indisputable that antigravity, from the point of view of dark energy, is present on Earth as well. But its value within the framework of such systems as man - Earth and Earth - Sun is so insignificant that it cannot even be confirmed experimentally. The experimental difference between gravity and antigravity appears only on huge scales, on scales greater than hundreds of light years.

According to the latest data, the density of dark energy is not increasing. Perhaps its value will remain constant. But what could be the development of events if the newly discovered dark side of the universe behaves unpredictably?! This cannot be ruled out, because, as astronomers themselves say, we do not know what it is, what it consists of ...

We are all aware from school physics lessons that a person is very dependent on gravity, attraction, the forces of universal gravitation. Thanks to this, we can walk and run, and our houses and everything else do not soar into the sky. And we also drink tea from mugs thanks to gravity. Without it, they would squeeze out liquid from tubes, like astronauts ...

But what will happen to the Earth and us if gravity disappears and there is no gravitational force? There is only one option: in a second, or even faster, everything will die. The planet will remain without an atmosphere, without air, oceans... Everything stays here and lives only in the presence of gravity.

But while we are in place and, according to astronomers, we will not fly away into space due to the dark energy and antigravity prevailing in the Universe. Another thing is that the expansion of the Universe, and even with acceleration, will ultimately be disastrous for us in any case.

Catastrophic scenarios are possible - scientists admit it. A theoretical horror story - everything will end up being torn to shreds, because of this, antigravity will become the main type of energy on our planet.

The Euclid telescope is being prepared for launch by the European Space Agency for urgent research. Observations will cover space with a radius of 10 billion light years. It will be possible to measure changes in the distances between galaxies that are very far from us. This is important because it will be possible to calculate the prospects. So far, the most common thing that astronomers talk about is the future Big Rip of the Universe.

There are models of the so-called phantom dark energy, when the expansion rate of the Universe is so high that there is a finite period of time during which the scale factor of the Universe, that is, physical distances, tends to infinity. This is called bigrip in English-language literature, in the Russian-language version it is translated as a big gap. That is, when everything in the Universe begins to diverge from each other so quickly that everything will be torn into elementary components and taken out of the so-called “visible horizon”.

But what is the "apparent horizon" or is it sometimes referred to as the "event horizon"? It's kind of a line beyond which we don't know what's going on, and by the way, we won't. Space objects will be so far away that they cannot be felt, heard, or seen by any devices and telescopes. Any contact of everything with everything in the Universe will be lost!

According to astronomers, the expansion of the universe can be imagined as a boundless rubber tablecloth that someone stretches from different sides - while any two galaxies that were at a certain distance from each other will constantly move away. This is the expansion of the universe.

But in all this catastrophic scenario, there is one significant “but”. What is inside our Milky Way will not move away from each other. The sun and all the planets will remain in place, and the neighboring galaxies will not fly off to us either. For example, the Andromeda Nebula will not take away from us - it is too tightly connected with us by gravity. Dark energy is powerless here, but is there a plus in this?! As it turns out, no! For the Earth and the solar system, the neighboring galaxy is a very serious threat. She falls on us!

The pictures of astronomical simulations show how two galaxies are now approaching each other. The Milky Way - "Milky way" - that's us. Modeling shows that Andromeda is twice as large. This means that the power of gravity is much higher.

There are already numerical calculations of the dynamics of the merger of these two galaxies, while various cataclysms are possible in their centers - absorption of stars, explosions of stars, dynamic instabilities that will be thrown out by stars.

But what do the explosions of stars mean to us, even too far away?! This can lead to the mass extinction of all life on Earth, and there is evidence of this from history. A group of paleontologists has revealed the periodicity in the last 250 million years of just such global catastrophes on our planet. They counted 12 of them, and the average interval between them is 26 million years. These extinctions are connected precisely with various events in space. Two, for example, were due to the impact of asteroids on Earth, and one definitely happened due to the explosion of a star.

Physicists note that the intensity of the resulting gamma rays is not so great as to burn all life, but they burn the ozone layer, and it takes several months or even several years to restore it. Without the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from ultraviolet radiation, if not all, then 80-90% of living organisms will die out.

But we are talking about disastrous results from the explosion of one star. And how many of them can explode when our Galaxy is swallowed up by the neighboring Andromeda Nebula? Dozens? Hundreds?...

There are many examples in the Universe when one galaxy merged with another. Mostly the big ones were swallowed up by the kids. Our Milky Way is also a kind of Hannibal - it contains several dwarf galaxies. First, he stretched them with his tidal forces, slowly pumped the gas out of them, and that's all - the absorption happened.

For us, this happens without much catastrophism, but the dwarfs get it. An example is the Magellanic Clouds. We can even see them with the naked eye. The navigator Ferdinand Magellan, after whom these two tiny satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are named, used them for navigation.

They are not yet part of our Galaxy. But soon they will - the merger is already happening!

Observers of life in the Universe indicate that the Magellanic Clouds are flying through our galaxy, and this greatly distorts them, because of this they even have a shapeless appearance.

When the Andromeda galaxy starts to approach our Milky Way, we, the inhabitants of the Earth, will notice this. Astronomers say that the structure of the starry sky will be rebuilt first of all. For example, we will no longer see the usual Ursa Major.

When that will happen is hard to say. Until 2012, there was no way at all to know whether a collision would occur or not. Only after 10 years of tracking Andromeda with the Hubble telescope did it become clear that it was moving exactly towards us and at a very decent speed, about 110 kilometers per second.

But scientists do not exclude that the neighboring galaxy will slightly deviate from the course and there will be no head-on collision. The consequences for us in this scenario are less catastrophic, however, the impact will be significant - the power of gravity will partially destroy both one and the other galaxies.

Tidal forces in such situations - and these are also gravitational forces - begin to tear galaxies apart, tearing pieces from them, even small ones. In the future, these pieces either fly away somewhere into space, or are attracted to one of the galaxies.

Black holes will definitely benefit from the collision of two galaxies. These gravitational funnels of incredible strength draw in everything that enters their field. Any progress, changes in outer space, and even more so global, such as the merger of two galaxies, is a real holiday for these monsters. They will have lunch and dinner!

Using an elementary example, this can be explained as follows: when two galaxies collide, the movement of stars becomes more chaotic. And some stars and galactic clouds fall into the area of action of this very black hole, and it begins to absorb them. In this case, intense light is emitted, and we can already see this black hole from Earth.

Astronomers are not particularly smart when naming space objects. If you can't see it, then it's dark energy. If everything falls into something and this funnel is also invisible, then a black hole. Such a monster sits at the center of the Milky Way. Without a break, absorbing everything that is attracted. This is the main black hole in our galaxy.

Igor Stanislavovich Prokopenko

Secrets of the Apocalypse

Infographics © RIA Novosti

Foreword

It will inevitably perish, and already in this millennium.

Space disasters

1. Galaxy Eaters

Right now one of the galaxies is dying in space. Stripes of gas and stars remain from it, it is torn apart by one of the most gigantic structures of the Universe - the Great Attractor.

Current page: 1 (the book has a total of 16 pages) [available reading excerpt: 11 pages]

Igor Stanislavovich Prokopenko
Secrets of the Apocalypse