Cosmic Strings in the Universe: Achievements and prospects of research

Cosmic strings are linear structures of cosmological scales whose search has been actively conducted in recent years. Progress in constructing theoretical models and investigating the properties of cosmic strings and a significant growth of observational resources provide extensive possibilities for the search of such objects by several independent observational methods. These methods include searching for the events of gravitational lensing of distant background sources by strings and searching for the distinctive cosmic micro-wave background anisotropy structures induced by strings. We discuss these techniques and propose the methods of searching for strings oriented toward the latest spacecraft, including the Planck project.