№ 4 (2020)

When General Relativity appeared in the beginning of the XX century it brought a number of revolutionary predictions. However, it than took decades to find observational evidences for most of those predictions. In this review I. D. Novikov tells us how General Relativity evolved from a purely theoretical field to stunning experiments and observational discoveries. The reader will be introduced to black holes, dark energy and still exotic and mysterious wormholes.

60 years ago in 1960 Siberian Institute of Earth Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation (SubIZMIR) was founded in Irkutsk within the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The Institute became the first-rate scientific center in the field of near-Earth space physics in the East of the USSR and built a remarkable set of research instruments. In 1986 it was awarded with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. In 1993 it was renamed and became the Institute of Solar Terrestrial Physics of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Now it is the base for the future National Heliogeophysical Complex of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Magnetic fields, which underlie the observed solar activity’s phenomena, are among the main objects of studies in the Institute of Solar Terrestrial Physics, which turns 60 in 2020. Vladimir Ye. Stepanov, the corresponding member of the RAS, did a lot for these studies. In Irkutsk, full-vector magnetometers were built for six observatories in the USSR, German Democratic Republic, and Czechoslovakia, which reinforced scientific contacts and exchange. In the following years, Solar Telescope for Operative Prediction was developed, and its samples were installed at ISTP Sayan and Baikal Observatories, as well as at Mountain Astronomical Station of the Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Kislovodsk and at Solar station in Ussuriysk. It was a great initiative to develop the modern "Solar Service”. The paper is dedicated to some of the results of the group.