How do scientists in "Sky Lab" work?
Xinhua News Agency, Guiyang, January 25 (Reporter Qi Jian) The "China Sky Eye" is in a depression, but in the eyes of scientists, it is a "sky laboratory" with deep space in mind.
What do scientists rely on to "connect" between heaven and earth, and how do they manage such a huge radio telescope to serve scientific experiments?
Until now, no astronomers should have been to space, but they are the group of people who know the universe best. What do they rely on?
Many people have tried to watch the solar eclipse with exposed film when they were young, and they have made their own optical telescope with two magnifying glasses.
The telescope is an essential tool for astronomers to understand the universe.
However, radio telescopes are different from the familiar optical telescopes. They cannot directly image. Instead, they capture the target's radio signal and speak with data.
How do astronomers use the "sky eye" to carry out their work?
It's a bit similar to a moving target shooting sport, which requires constant selection of targets, aiming at the target and shooting, and analyzing the results.
According to Li Kejia, a professor at Peking University and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the first step is to consider whether the telescope frequency is appropriate, whether the sensitivity is sufficient, and whether the target is within the visible range, so as to determine the coordinates of the observation source and form an observation list.
The second step is to perform observations by the telescope control department.
How to precisely control the "eye of the sky" to aim at targets that are easily light-years away?
Simply put, one is to calculate the "posture" required by the telescope through the celestial coordinates, and the other is to drive the motor to control the "posture" of the telescope.
Because the earth is constantly rotating and revolving, such observation is much more complicated than shooting with a moving target. It is necessary to constantly correct the position of the telescope, keep aiming at the target, and ensure that it always hits the bullseye.
The third step is to analyze the data through programming.
The quiet "eyes of the sky" on the outside, the heart is surging, and the highest transmission data per second is 38G.
With massive amounts of data, there is basically no possibility of manual analysis, so astronomers are all "programmers" who use big data to achieve "connection" between heaven and earth.
What is the point of such a cumbersome observation of the deep space of the universe?
This starts when we go to the middle school physics laboratory to do experiments.
The laws of physics discovered by older scientists, we do experiments in the physics laboratory, and the results can verify that the laws are true.
What about in the "Sky Lab"?
Not always.
Astronomy is inseparable from physics. The large-scale space-time structure, the evolution of the universe, and high-energy celestial bodies (such as black holes, pulsars, etc.) are all based on general relativity.
The predecessors relied on their brains to do experiments and came up with theories. Theoretical research is ahead. How can future generations verify it?
The quality of these celestial bodies is amazing, the distance is measured in light years, and the corresponding physical parameters and space are inaccessible to humans, and can only be verified by the "sky laboratory".
In the "Sky Lab", astronomers, in addition to repeating tedious observations and verifications, keep a heart of expectation-such as finding a key that can explain some strange astronomical phenomena, or discovering phenomena that cannot be explained by current theories .
When that day comes, scientific theory will take another big step forward.