演講MP3+雙語文稿:有史以來最詳細(xì)的星系、黑洞和恒星地圖

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[演講者及介紹]Juna Kollmeier

理論天體物理學(xué)家Juna Kollmeier使用了天文學(xué)中已知的所有技術(shù)——數(shù)學(xué)、計算機和來自地面和太空望遠(yuǎn)鏡的數(shù)據(jù)——試圖通過繪制大規(guī)模的恒星、星系和黑洞的地圖來了解宇宙是如何形成的。

[演講主題]有史以來最詳細(xì)的星系、黑洞和恒星地圖

[中英文字幕]

翻譯者 Yolanda Zhang 校對者 Jin Ge

00:01

When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark.The darkness is where the monsters are. And I had this little night lightoutside of my bedroom so that it would never get too dark. But over time, myfear of the dark turned to curiosity. What is out there in the"dark-dark?" And it turns out that trying to understand the darknessis something that's fascinated humans for thousands of years, maybe forever.And we know this because we find their ancient relics of their attempts to mapthe sky.

當(dāng)我還是孩子時，我很懼怕黑暗。黑暗是怪獸出沒的地方。我的臥室外面有一盞小小的夜燈，這樣我的房間就不會一片漆黑。但是隨著時間推移，我對黑暗的恐懼變成了好奇。黑暗中都有什么？我發(fā)現(xiàn) 數(shù)千年來，人類一直在試圖探索黑暗，這種好奇心可能永遠(yuǎn)不會消逝。我們知道這一點，是因為我們找到了祖先們試圖繪制星空位置的古老遺跡。

01:29

It'sour calling card as a species in the galaxy to figure things out. We know ourplanet, we cure our diseases, we cook our food, we leave our planet. But it'snot easy. Understanding the universe is battle. It is unrelenting, it istime-varying, and it is one we are all in together. It is a battle in thedarkness against the darkness. Which is why Orion has weapons. In any case, ifyou're going to engage in this battle, you need to know the battlefield.

這是我們作為星系中的一個物種來解決問題的標(biāo)志。我們了解我們的星球，能治愈我們的疾病，會烹飪我們的食物，甚至還能離開我們的星球進入太空。但這并不容易。探索宇宙是一場戰(zhàn)斗。充滿艱辛，變幻無窮，我們所有人都置身其中。這是一場在黑暗中對抗黑暗的戰(zhàn)斗。這就是獵戶座擁有武器的原因。無論如何，如果你要參與這場戰(zhàn)斗，就需要了解身處的戰(zhàn)場。

02:27

So at its core, mapping the sky involvesthree essential elements. You've got objects that are giving off light, you'vegot telescopes that are collecting that light, and you've got instruments thatare helping you understand what that light is. Many of you have mapped the Moonphases over time with your eyes, your eyes being your more basic telescope. Andyou've understood what that means with your brains, your brains being one ofyour more basic instruments. Now, if you and a buddy get together, you wouldspend over 30 years, you would map 1,000 stars extremely precisely. You wouldmove the front line to the battle. And that's what Tycho Brahe and his buddy,or his assistant, really, Johannes Kepler did back in the 1600s. And they movedthe line, figured out how planets worked, how they moved around the Sun.

測繪天空地圖的核心包括三個基本要素。有發(fā)光的觀測對象，有收集光線的望遠(yuǎn)鏡，還有幫助你分析理解這些光線的儀器。我們當(dāng)中很多人都用眼睛觀測過月相圖，眼睛是很基礎(chǔ)的望遠(yuǎn)鏡。我們也理解了大腦扮演著什么樣的角色，大腦就是最基礎(chǔ)的分析儀器。如果你和一個朋友在一起，花費30多年的時間，你就能繪制出1000 顆恒星極其精確的圖像。你要把前線搬到戰(zhàn)場上去。這就是第谷·布拉赫和他的伙伴，確切的說是他的助手，約翰尼斯·開普勒在17世紀(jì)所做的。他們移動了這條線，弄清楚了行星的運動軌跡，它們是如何圍繞太陽運轉(zhuǎn)的。

03:23

But it wasn't until about 100 years agothat we realized it's a big universe. It seems like the universe is justinfinite, which it is, but the observable universe is finite. Which means wecan win the battle. But if you're going to map the universe, you're not goingto do it with one or two of your besties. Mapping the universe takes an army,an army of curious, creative, craftspeople who, working together, canaccomplish the extraordinary. I lead this army of creatives, in the fifthgeneration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS. And this is how astronomershave managed to shepherd individual curiosity through its industrial age,preserving the individual ability to make discoveries but putting into placemega machinery to truly advance the frontier.

但直到大約100年前，我們才意識到這個宇宙很大。宇宙看起來是無邊無際的，事實也確實如此，但是可觀測的宇宙是有限的。這意味著我們可以贏得這場戰(zhàn)斗。但如果你要繪制宇宙地圖，叫上一兩個好朋友是不夠的。繪制宇宙地圖需要一支軍隊，一支充滿好奇心、富有創(chuàng)造力、技藝精湛的軍隊，他們齊心協(xié)力，就可以完成非凡的任務(wù)。我領(lǐng)導(dǎo)著這支創(chuàng)意大軍，參加了第五代斯隆數(shù)字巡天項目，簡稱SDSS。這就是天文學(xué)家們?nèi)绾卧诠I(yè)時代成功的：他們激發(fā)了個人的好奇心，保留了個人探索的能力，同時投入巨大的機器來真正推進探索的邊界。

04:21

In SDSS, we divide the sky into threemappers: one for the stars, one for the black holes and one for the galaxies.My survey has two hemispheres, five telescopes, or 11, depending on how youcount, 10 spectrographs and millions of objects. It's a monster. So let's gothrough the mappers.

在SDSS中，我們將天空分割成三個探索區(qū)域：一個探索恒星，一個探索黑洞，一個探索星系。我的測繪范圍包含兩個半球，5個望遠(yuǎn)鏡，或者11個，取決于你怎么計數(shù)，10個攝譜儀以及數(shù)百萬個觀測對象。這真是一個龐然大物。下面我們來看看這幾個區(qū)域。

04:45

The Milky Way galaxy has 250 billion plusor minus a few hundred billion stars. That is not a number that you hold inyour head. That is a number that doesn't make practical sense to pretty muchanybody. You never get 250 billion jelly beans in your hand. You know? We'renowhere near mapping all of those stars yet. So we have to choose the mostinteresting ones. In SDSS-V, we're mapping six million stars where we think wecan measure their age. Because if you can measure the age of a star, that'slike having six million clocks spread all throughout the Milky Way. And withthat information, we can unravel the history and fossil record of our galaxyand learn how it formed.

銀河系有2500億顆恒星，誤差可能有幾千億。這個數(shù)字大到難以想象。這個數(shù)字對任何人來說都沒有實際意義。生活中根本見不到這么大的數(shù)字。我們離測繪出所有這些恒星的分布還差得遠(yuǎn)。所以我們必須聚焦最有趣的那些。在SDSS-V中，我們正在測繪600萬顆恒星的圖像，我們認(rèn)為可以測算它們的年齡。因為如果你能測算一顆恒星的年齡，那就像在銀河系里分布著六百萬個時鐘。有了這些信息，我們就可以揭開銀河系的歷史和化石記錄，了解它的起源。

05:35

I'm just going to cut right to the chasehere. Black holes are among the most perplexing objects in the universe. Why?Because they are literally just math incarnate, in a physical form, that webarely understand. It's like the number zero being animated and walking aroundthe corridors here. That would be super weird. These are weirder. And it's notjust like a basketball that you smoosh down into a little point and it's superdense and that's weird. No, smooshed basketballs have a surface. These thingsdon't have surfaces, and we know that now. Because we've seen it. Or the lackof it. What's really interesting about black holes is that we can learn a lotabout them by studying the material just as it passes through that point of noinformation return. Because at that point, it's emitting lots of X-rays andoptical and UV and radio waves. We can actually learn how these objects grow.And in SDSS, we're looking at over half a million supermassive black holes, totry to understand how they formed.

我直接切入正題。黑洞是宇宙中最令人困惑的物質(zhì)之一。為什么? 因為它們幾乎是數(shù)學(xué)實體化的結(jié)果，以一種我們幾乎無法理解的物理形式存在著。就像數(shù)字0的動畫影像在我們身邊走來走去一樣。那太奇怪了。而黑洞的存在更令人匪夷所思。它不像一個籃球，不是把它塞進一個小點，密度就變得非常大。被壓縮的籃球好歹還有表面，這些東西沒有表面，我們現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)知道黑洞這點了。因為我們見過黑洞，或者應(yīng)該說，我們看到它沒有表面。黑洞最有意思的地方在于，我們可以通過研究穿過一個沒有信息返回的點的物質(zhì)來充分了解黑洞。因為在那個點，該物質(zhì)會發(fā)射出大量的X射線、可見光、紫外線和無線電波。我們可以知道這些黑洞是如何膨脹的。在SDSS中，我們觀察了超過50萬個超大質(zhì)量黑洞，試圖了解它們是如何形成的。

06:46

Like I said, we live in the Milky Way, youguys are all familiar with that. The Milky Way is a completely average galaxy.Nothing funny going on. But it's ours, which is great. We think that the MilkyWay, and all the Milky Ways, have this really disturbing past of literallyblowing themselves apart. It's like every average guy you know has a history asa punk rock teenager. That's very bizarre. Stars are blowing up in thesesystems, black holes are growing at their centers and emitting a tremendousamount of energy. How does that happen, how does this transformation happen?And at SDSS, we're going to the bellies of the beast and zooming way in, tolook at these processes where they are occurring in order to understand how SidVicious grows up into Ward Cleaver.

就像我說的，我們生活在銀河系，你們都很熟悉。銀河系是個十分普通的星系，沒有任何光怪陸離的現(xiàn)象。而這正是我們的家鄉(xiāng)，這一點很不錯。我們認(rèn)為銀河系，以及所有的銀河系，在過去都發(fā)生了驚心動魄的爆炸。就好比你認(rèn)識的每個普通人都曾是朋克搖滾的叛逆少年。這是非常奇怪的。恒星在這些系統(tǒng)中爆炸，中心形成了黑洞，并釋放出巨大的能量。這是怎么發(fā)生的，這種變化是怎么發(fā)生的? 而在SDSS，我們要深入這些星系怪物的內(nèi)部，一路上將觀察到的景象放大，看看這些過程在哪里發(fā)生，以便了解恒星變成黑洞的過程。

07:49

My arsenal. These are my two bigtelescopes. The Apache Point Observatory hosts the Sloan telescope in NewMexico, and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile hosts thetwo-and-a-half-meter telescope, the du Pont. Two and a half meters is the sizeof our mirror, which was huge for Tycho and Kepler. But it's actually not sobig today. There are way bigger telescopes out there. But in SDSS we use newinstruments on these old telescopes to make them interesting. We capture lightfrom all of those objects into our aperture, and that light is then focused atthe focal plane, where our instruments sit and process that light.

這些是我的研究設(shè)備。這是我的兩個大望遠(yuǎn)鏡。新墨西哥州的阿帕奇點天文臺擁有斯隆望遠(yuǎn)鏡，智利的拉斯坎帕納斯天文臺擁有2.5米寬的杜邦望遠(yuǎn)鏡。2.5米是我們鏡子的大小，這對第谷和開普勒來說是很大的，但是以今天的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)來看它實際上沒有那么大，還有更大的望遠(yuǎn)鏡。但在SDSS中，我們在這些舊望遠(yuǎn)鏡上連接了新儀器，使它們變得更有趣。我們把所有這些觀測對象的光都捕捉到光圈里，讓這些光聚焦在焦平面上，我們的儀器就在那里處理這些光。

08:30

What's new in SDSS-V is that we're makingthe focal plane entirely robotic. That's right: robots.

SDSS-V 的創(chuàng)新之處 在于我們將焦平面完全變成了機器人。沒錯：機器人。

08:39

(Laughter)

（笑聲）

08:59

And this is how they move on the sky. Sothese are our objects and a star field, so you've got stars, galaxies, blackholes. And our robots move to those objects as we pass over them in order tocapture the light from those stars and galaxies and black holes, and yes, it isweird to capture black hole light, but we've already gone over that black holesare weird.

這就是它們在天空中運動的方式。這些是我們的觀測對象和一個恒星場，這樣就看到了恒星，星系，黑洞。機器人移動到我們經(jīng)過的那些觀測對象，為了從這些恒星，星系和黑洞——是的，黑洞——捕捉光線。捕捉黑洞的光線很奇怪，但我剛剛就說過黑洞就是個奇怪的現(xiàn)象。

09:30

One more thing. Stars are exploding all thetime, like this one did back in 1987 in our cosmic backyard. Black holes aregrowing all the time. There is a new sky every night. Which means we can't justmap the sky one time. We have to map the sky multiple times. So in SDSS-V,we're going back to each part of the sky multiple times in order to see howthese objects change over time. Because those changes in time encode thephysics, and they encode how these objects are growing and changing. Mow thesky.

還有一件事。恒星一直在爆炸，就像這顆1987年在我們“宇宙后院”中爆炸的恒星。黑洞的規(guī)模一直在變大。天空在每天晚上都會煥然一新。這意味著我們不能只測繪一次，必須再反復(fù)幾次。所以在SDSS-V中，我們要多次回到天空的每個部分，為了看看這些觀測對象是如何隨著時間變化的。因為這些時間上的變化蘊含了物理原理，蘊含了這些觀測對象形成和變化的秘密。這一步就是“修整天空”。

10:18

OK, let me just recap. Global survey, twohemispheres, five telescopes, 10 spectrographs, millions of objects, mow thesky, creative army, robots, yeah. So you're thinking, "Wow. She must havethis industrial machine going, no room for the individual, curious, lone wolfgenius," right? And you'd be 100 percent wrong.

現(xiàn)在我們來總結(jié)一下。全球巡視，兩個半球，5個望遠(yuǎn)鏡，10個攝譜儀，數(shù)以百萬計的觀測對象，“修整天空”，創(chuàng)造性的軍隊，機器人，就是這些。你可能覺得不可思議。她的團隊一定是包攬了太空測繪工作，沒有空間留給個人，留給好奇的天才，對吧? 那你就大錯特錯了。

10:43

Meet Hanny's Voorwerp. Hanny van Arkel wasa Dutch schoolteacher who was analyzing the public versions of the SDSS data,when she found this incredibly rare type of object, which is now a subject ofmajor study. She was able to do this because SDSS, since its beginning and bymandate from the Sloan Foundation, has made its data both publicly availableand usable to a broad range of audiences. She's a citizen -- yeah, clap forthat. Clap for that.

來認(rèn)識一下哈尼天體。哈尼·馮·阿科爾曾經(jīng)是一名荷蘭教師，她在分析SDSS數(shù)據(jù)的公共版本時，發(fā)現(xiàn)了這種極其罕見的星體形態(tài)，現(xiàn)在成為了我們的主要研究對象。她之所以能做到這一點，是因為SDSS自成立以來，根據(jù)斯隆基金會的授權(quán)，已將其數(shù)據(jù)向大眾公開，廣大群眾都可以使用。她只是個普通公民，很了不起，為她鼓掌吧。

11:15

(Applause)

（掌聲）

11:19

Hanny is a citizen scientist, or as I liketo call them, "citizen warriors." And she shows that you don't haveto be a fancy astrophysicist to participate. You just have to be curious.

哈尼是一個草根科學(xué)家，我喜歡叫他們這樣的人“公民戰(zhàn)士”。她的例子說明你不需要成為一個杰出天體物理學(xué)家也能參與其中。只需要保持好奇心。

11:34

A few years ago, my four-year-old asked,"Can moons have moons?" And I set about to answer this questionbecause even though many four-year-olds over all of time have probably askedthis question, many experts, including myself, didn't know the answer. And thatjust goes to show you that there are so many basic questions left to beunderstood.

幾年前，我四歲的孩子問：“月亮也有月亮嗎？”我開始準(zhǔn)備認(rèn)真回答這個問題，因為盡管許多四歲左右的孩子一直都在問這個問題，但許多專家，包括我自己，都不知道答案。這只是告訴你們，還有很多基本問題需要去探索答案。

12:05

And this brings me to the most importantpoint about SDSS. Because, yeah, the stars, the galaxies, the black holes, therobots -- that's all super cool. But the coolest thing of all is thateensy-weensy creatures on a rubble pile around a totally average star in atotally average galaxy can win the battle to understand their world.

這就引出了關(guān)于SDSS最重要的一點。沒錯，恒星，星系，黑洞，機器人——這些都非?？帷５羁岬氖?，在一個非常普通的星系中，圍繞著一顆非常普通的恒星，一群不起眼的生物（人類）在瓦礫堆上能夠贏得探索它們世界的戰(zhàn)斗。

12:47

(Cheers) (Applause)

（歡呼）（掌聲）

12:54

I'm showing here the number of galaxiesthat astronomers have mapped in large surveys since about 1980. If we stay onthis line, we will map every large galaxy in the observable universe by 2060.Think about that. Think about it: we've gone from arranging clamshells togeneral relativity to SDSS in a few thousand years -- and if we hang on 40more, we can map all the galaxies. But we have to stay on the line. Will thatbe our choice?

我在這里展示的是自1980年以來，天文學(xué)家在大型巡天過程中測繪出的星系數(shù)量。如果我們繼續(xù)沿著這條線走，到2060年我們將繪制出可觀測宇宙中每一個大星系的樣貌。想想看。想想看吧：在幾千年的時間里，我們已經(jīng)完成了從整理蛤殼到廣義相對論，再到整理SDSS的跨越——如果我們再堅持40年，將可以繪制出所有星系的樣貌。但前提是我們必須堅持下去。我們能做出這樣的選擇嗎？

13:36

There are dark forces in this world thatwill rob our entire species of our right to understand our universe. Don't beafraid of the dark. Fight back. Join us.

這個世界上有一些黑暗勢力，它們將剝奪我們整個物種理解宇宙的權(quán)利。不要懼怕黑暗。反擊。加入我們的行列。

13:51

Thank you.

謝謝大家！

13:52

(Applause)

（掌聲）