November Gallery

Salyut 7 space station in orbit

The Salyut 7 space station photographed in orbit. Attached to the space station at bottom, with the separate solar panels, is the Soyuz T14 ferry spacecraft. Soyuz T14 was launched on 17 September 1985 and carried cosmonauts Vladimir Vasyutin, Alexander Volkov and Georgi Grechko to Salyut 7. Their mission was terminated when Vasyutin became seriously ill, and they returned to Earth on 22 November 1985

© RIA NOVOSTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Portrait of Pavel Cerenkov

Pavel Cerenkov, Russian physicist, born Voronezh Guberniya on August 10, 1904, photographed (on right) at the controls of a synchrotron at the Institute of Physics of the Soviet Academy of Science, in 1959. His important discovery in 1934 involved the velocity of high-energy subatomic particles, which is never greater than the velocity of light in a vacuum. Light travelling through water, however, moves more slowly: a high- energy particle moving through water may exceed the velocity of light in that medium. When it does it creates a "wake" of light - termed Cerenkov radiation. For this work, Cerenkov, Frank & Tamm shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics

© RIA NOVOSTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Lev Landau, Russian physicist

Lev Landau, Russian physicist, born in Baku, Azerbaijan on January 22, 1908, died in Moscow, April 1, 1968. Landau obtained his Ph.D. at the age of 19, after which he travelled abroad, visiting Gottingen, Leipzig, studying with Bohr in Copenhagen & Rutherford in Cambridge. In 1935, he pioneered a mathematical treatment of magnetic domains; in 1937 he began working with Kapitza in Moscow on low-temperature physics. Landau's work for the next two decades involved explanations of the behaviour of isotopes of helium at extremely low temperatures in terms of quantum mechanics. For his work on helium-3, he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in physics

© RIA NOVOSTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY