The scientific research of the nature of man could not be limited to a simple contemplation of the world around him and abstract logical reasoning about his possible structure. To open regularities of these or those phenomena, to study the structure of natural objects, people needed, first of all, observations and experiments.
The first, initial stage of any research is observation, the second, most effective way is experiment.
That is why it is not surprising that the human being's cognition of the surrounding world began with the study of those objects and phenomena, which he could directly observe, touch, which he faced in his everyday life, in his industrial practice.
As for the inner essence of the phenomena, the deep laws underlying them, people thought about it in ancient times, but in those days they could express in most cases only speculative guesswork. And only at a certain stage of its development science was able to study not only what lies on the surface, but also what is hidden from direct observation.
The most important turning point in the development of science, with which, in fact, the scientific study of nature began, was, as has already been said, the teachings of the Polish astronomer Nikolai Copernicus.
The merit of Copernicus was not only that he had created a heliocentric teaching about the structure of the world, but also that instead of the principle of "the world as we see it", he had established a different position in science: "The world is not what it seems to us. And the task of natural science is to reveal this inner nature of phenomena.
When science penetrated the world of the atom, the world of microprocessors, it faced a number of "strange", "strange" phenomena, but so it should be.
And there is nothing striking in the fact that the search for these patterns is not only in earthly physical laboratories but also in the laboratory of space. After all, in the end, any space object, no matter how gigantic its scale, consists of elementary particles. Therefore, physics and astronomy are closely related. But if in physics the main means of cognition is an experiment, then astronomy is an observational science, which inevitably complicates the study of spatial processes and objects.
All information about space objects brings to Earth various radiations - electromagnetic waves and currents of corpuscles - particles of matter. The properties of such radiations depend on the nature of the physical processes that gave rise to them. By studying these properties, an astronomer can learn a lot about the nature of phenomena that occur in the depths of the universe.
The first messenger of distant worlds was the light beam. And to this day, the greatest amount of information about the cosmic processes brings light. Therefore, the basis of astronomy, its constant foundation - the study of cosmic rays of light ...
In clear weather, you can count up to three thousand stars in the sky. But this is only a very small part of those stars and other space objects that exist in our area of the world...
On moonless nights, the Milky Way is clearly visible, stretching from one side of the horizon to the other. It seems to be a cluster of luminous mist masses. But it is worth pointing a telescope at the Milky Way, and we will immediately find that it consists of many stars. This star system, to which our Sun belongs, is called the Galaxy
It's extremely difficult to study our galaxy. This is one of the most difficult tasks of science. After all, we are inside this galaxy and can neither fly beyond it nor visit its various places. Nevertheless, science is overcoming these difficulties.
And today we can already speak with confidence about what our star island looks like. In its center is the core, surrounded by many stars. A few mighty spiral branches depart from it...
Our Galaxy is so large that its size is not easy to imagine: from one side to the other, a light beam travels about 100,000 Earth years.
Most of the stars of our galaxy are concentrated in a giant "disk" with a thickness of about 1500 light-years. At a distance of about 30 thousand light-years from the center of the Galaxy is our Sun.
The main "population" of the Galaxy is stars. The world of these celestial bodies is extremely diverse. Although all the stars are hot balloons like the Sun, their physical characteristics differ significantly. There are, for example, stars of giants and supergiants. They are much larger than the Sun.