We Were Wrong About How Empty Space Really Is скачать в хорошем качестве

We Were Wrong About How Empty Space Really Is

Picture the space between stars. You probably imagine a perfect vacuum. Absolute emptiness. A void where nothing exists. Science fiction reinforces this image constantly. Silent darkness. Perfect blackness. The vacuum of space. We even call it empty space, as if emptiness is its defining characteristic. But we were wrong. Profoundly wrong. The space between stars isn't empty at all. It's filled with gas, dust, cosmic rays, electromagnetic radiation, and magnetic fields threading through it all. Astronomers call this the interstellar medium. And it's far more complex, dynamic, and important than we ever imagined. The interstellar medium is extremely tenuous by Earth standards. The average density is roughly one atom per cubic centimeter, or about one million atoms per cubic meter. To put that in perspective, Earth's atmosphere contains roughly ten billion trillion molecules per cubic centimeter. The best laboratory vacuum we can create on Earth still has about ten billion molecules per cubic meter. The interstellar medium is ten thousand times less dense than the best vacuum human technology can achieve. Yet describing it as empty is fundamentally wrong. It's a gas. More precisely, it's a plasma, ionized and responding to electromagnetic radiation. It behaves as a continuous medium, not as a collection of isolated particles drifting through nothingness.