Description
The musical cycle «Music of Celestial Spheres» by composer Andrey Klimkovsky was born in 1997, when, completely unexpectedly for himself, the musician wrote the album «from dusk till dawn», which became the first chapter in a long and fascinating musical narrative. In the following two years, Andrey Klimkovsky released 4 more albums continuing the theme of the cycle, but with the beginning of the third millennium, a ten-year break was outlined in the work on new themes of the cycle. The composer did not close the project. There were simply other musical experiments. Andrey Klimkovsky's albums were released annually, but not quite in this style. And in 2011, largely due to the opening of the Moscow Planetarium and the general rise in interest among listeners in this kind of music — "the music of starry nights among the domes of observatories" — the musician had a desire and inspiration returned to continue the cycle «Music of Celestial Spheres». But the fateful impetus to start the work was the offer to write a soundtrack for an educational program in a planetarium dedicated to the smallest inhabitants of the solar system — meteoric bodies, which often become the cause of a very beautiful atmospheric phenomenon — a “falling star” or, as astronomers say, a meteor.
There used to be more of them — the cratered Moon holds evidence of past meteorite activity — all the space between the orbits of the large planets of the Solar System was filled with various kinds of stones, boulders the size of a cliff, and maybe even a mountain range. The formation of the planets ended about 4.5 billion years ago, but there is a lot of unclaimed material left — a planet can no longer be built from it, but also — cannot be counted. Over long billions of years, the planets have collected most of this meteoric matter — some objects fell on the surface of the planets, forming hundreds of thousands of craters on the Moon, Venus, Mars and Mercury. At one time, Earth got it too, but it is very difficult to find traces of prehistoric meteorite bombardment on our planet. But now interplanetary space is much freer and most often on the path of our planet in orbit around the Sun there are tiny particles — the size of a pea. Flying into the atmosphere at cosmic speed, they quickly heat up and burn up, leaving a glowing trail in the sky. Astronomers call the glow in the high layers of the atmosphere produced by a small space guest a “meteor”. But this beautiful phenomenon can create an illusion — as if a star fell from the crystal firmament of heaven, unable to stay in the sky. In fact, stars do not fall from the sky, but larger particles sometimes reach the earth's surface. And then scientists talk about a meteorite falling. Meteorites fall much less often than “flights of meteors” across the dark night sky, because during the era of activity of certain meteor showers, several dozen “falling stars” can be counted in an hour of observation.
Where do these small particles come from to burn up, disappear, merge with the substance of the Earth, but shine for a few moments like eternal and distant stars? Their destinies are different. It is quite possible that some of these particles are captured by our Sun — its gravity — during a long interstellar flight through the Galaxy. Stars often pass through gas and dust nebulae — an example of this is the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. And then the substance of this nebula — dust and microparticles — can become our new neighbors in the Solar System.
Of course, most meteoric particles are generated by the destruction of comet nuclei. Comets melt as they approach the Sun, and countless swarms of meteoric particles are released from their icy depths. They stretch along the cometary orbit, and when the Earth passes close to the orbit of an old destroyed comet, we have meteor showers — when tens of thousands of meteors can be counted in one night.
But there are also completely independent meteoroids that travel alone. Their paths are very tangled — they often get captured by massive planets and can rotate for millions of years in the company of the same careless pebbles — it is from them that the rings of Saturn and other gas giants are made. Sometimes they manage to leave the environment of the "ringed" planets and then they again have a chance to become a star and fulfill someone's wish.
