What color is the universe? Detailed answer

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What color is the universe? Detailed answer

Big encyclopedia for children and adults

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Did you know?

What color is the universe?

a) Black with silver dots.
b) Silver with black dots.
c) Pale green.
d) Beige.

Officially, the universe is beige.

In 2002, after analyzing the light from 200 galaxies collected by Australian specialists as part of the Redshift Galactic Mapping project, American scientists from Johns Hopkins University concluded that the color of the universe is pale green. If we take the Dulax palette of colors as a basis, then this color will be somewhere between "Mexican mint", "jade cluster" and "Shangri-La silk".

True, within a few weeks after the report to the American Astronomical Society, scientists had to admit that an unfortunate error had crept into their calculations and that in fact the color of the Universe was closer to some dull shades of gray-brown.

Back in the XNUMXth century, the greatest and most inquisitive minds pondered the question: why is the sky dark at night? After all, if the Universe is infinite and an infinite number of stars are evenly scattered in its space, then everywhere you look, there will definitely be some kind of star, which means that the night sky should be as bright as during the day.

In science, this riddle is known as the "photometric paradox of Olbers" - in honor of the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who described (but not the first in history) this mysterious phenomenon in 1826.

However, until today no one has found a truly convincing answer to this question. Perhaps the number of stars in the Universe is still finite, or maybe the light from the most distant stars simply has not reached us yet. Olbers solved the problem in his own way: in his opinion, not all stars shone in the distant past, and one fine day something nevertheless "turned on" them.

Edgar Allan Poe, in his prophetic poem Eureka (1848), was the first to suggest that light from the most distant stars is still on its way to us.

In 2003, an interesting experiment was carried out: the wide-angle camera of the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a section of the night sky that seemed to be the most empty. The effective exposure of the image was one million seconds (about eleven days).

The resulting image showed tens of thousands of hitherto unknown galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of millions of stars disappearing into the far reaches of space.

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Do grasshoppers have hearing?

There are animals we tend to think of as being unable to hear, see, or sleep just because they look weird. The grasshopper is just one such animal. Yes, in many ways this is an unusual creature, but contrary to popular belief, he has ears and he hears!

There are many varieties of grasshoppers, but in general they all look about the same. All grasshoppers have strong jaws, three pairs of legs, and in most cases two pairs of wings. The first pair of wings is rigid and straight, the second is membranous and folds under the first pair. The hind legs, used by the grasshopper for jumping, are unusually long and well developed. Depending on the length of the antennae, grasshoppers are divided into two main groups: long-whiskered and short-whiskered.

The group of short-whiskered grasshoppers, also known as locusts, includes the common brown grasshopper. This species of grasshopper "sings" by vibrating its hind legs against its front wings. A grasshopper listens with ears located on the abdomen at the base of the hind legs. Long-whiskered grasshoppers, which include green meadow grasshoppers and narrow-winged grasshoppers, have antennae that are longer than their own body length.

In all species, only males “sing”, extracting the sound by rubbing the front wings against each other. The ears of these grasshoppers are located on the front pair of legs. So, although grasshoppers have hearing, their ears are rather unusual, and they are located in unexpected places.

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Random news from the Archive

The lifetime of a free neutron has been measured 27.10.2021

Researchers at Indiana University, together with their colleagues from other scientific institutions and from other countries, have made the most accurate measurements of the lifetime of free neutrons, neutrons that are outside the confines of atomic nuclei. The results obtained by scientists have an error level of less than one tenth of a percent, and this accuracy is almost twice that of similar previous measurements.

"The process of neutron decay, which produces a proton, an electron, and an almost weightless particle called a neutrino, is one of the most exciting processes known to nuclear physicists," the researchers write. "High-precision measurement of the lifetime of free neutrons is also an important part of modern science, how this knowledge can shed light on some of the mysteries of the formation and development of the Universe, plus, it will allow physicists to discover flaws in existing models that describe the "work" of the Universe at the subatomic level."

The neutrons that were the subject of these studies were produced by the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Ultracold Neutron source located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The UCNtau device captures these neutrons, cools them to a temperature close to absolute zero, and holds them in a vacuum chamber with 4 magnets that generate a magnetic field of complex configuration. After 30-90 minutes of waiting, scientists recalculate the number of "surviving" neutrons trapped in the trap.

The unique design of the UCNtau facility makes it possible to store "frozen" neutrons for 11 days, much longer than other similar facilities can do. Over more than two years, the researchers counted about 40 million neutrons, and the analysis of the collected data made it possible to establish the lifetime of a free neutron, which was 877.75 seconds with a statistical error of 0.28 seconds and a system error of +0.22/-0.16 percent.

The values obtained by scientists will allow them in the near future to confirm or disprove the legitimacy of the so-called CKM matrix (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix), a theory concerning subatomic particles called quarks, and playing an important role in the Standard Model of physics elementary particles.

All this can also help physicists test new ideas, such as the possibility of neutron decay into dark matter particles, which will give a new impetus to theories about the development of the Universe and provide an opportunity to explain the mechanisms by which the nuclei of the first atoms were formed in the early Universe.

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