Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences is formerly known as the Astronomical Council of the Academy of Sciences USSR, before 1990.

Overview

The institute is involved in developing and launching space-based astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

 platforms, and scientific research that investigates the origins of star

Star

A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

s, solar system

Solar System

The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

s, and galactic formations

Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...

. It also contains several large databases

Bibliographic database

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...

 and catalogs related to astronomical and astrophysical data, literature, and applications. Its space based research includes projects on national and international cooperative scales.

This institute also organizes and co-sponsors conferences, international conferences, meetings, and seminars related to its research areas. The institute also contains the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LNS RAS), founded in 1947.

In addition, an extensive body of published scientific literature has been published over the years.

Library

The institute library

Library

In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...

 holds foreign literature, besides Russian literature, of the 18th through the 21st centuries. The topics of interest are: astronomy, physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, mechanics

Mechanics

Mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the behavior of physical bodies when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent effects of the bodies on their environment....

, Earth sciences, cosmonautics, and electronics

Electronics

Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...

. The library consists of 60,000 items consisting of 10,000 books and 50,000 periodicals.