Into Unscientific

"What have I been doing lately?"

Xu Yun's side.

Zhang Heguang raised his eyebrows, spread his hands helplessly, and sighed:

"What else can I fmd do in such a broken place?"

"In the morning, I turned on the computer, got a glass of water, read documents, typed codes, and was scolded by the instructor."

"Then eat at noon, play with cats, take a nap, watch dramas, turn on the computer in the afternoon, get a glass of water, read literature, type codes, and continue to be scolded by the instructor."

"."

Seeing Zhang Heguang with a thoughtful face, Xu Yun's face suddenly showed a trace of sympathy.

Speaking of the four words of astrophysics, most people must have such a picture in their minds:

Against the vast and deep dark blue background, a huge planet is shining brightly, surrounded by several other smaller stars.

The tails of those stars dragged light white trails, forming a rotating vortex with the central star

But in fact.

Astrophysics is a major that involves a large number of mathematical formulas.

Most of them read the literature and push the formula almost every day, and then make a cup of wolfberry tea to lament life

Of course.

For a doctoral student like Zhang Heguang, he will participate in some other large and small projects in the interval of hard life.

So after complaining, Zhang Heguang still had a bitter face, and counted with his fingers:

"In addition to the literature, the University of Science and Technology recently subcontracted part of the sky survey data analysis, and this job fell on me. I saw that I was almost redshifted."

"There are also some projects of LAMOST and HXMT, as well as research on black hole models, X-ray binary star systems, etc. Anyway, they are very boring."

Xu Yun nodded thoughtfully.

Then he quickly glanced at Zhang Heguang, and found that the other party's attention was not on him, so he pretended to be curious and asked:

"X-ray binary star system? Old Zhang, I remember it was reported that our solar system may also be a binary star system. Is there a star in the far side of the solar system? Is there any progress now?"

"What progress can there be?"

Zhang Heguang snorted coldly with disdain, and spread his hands:

"It's just some marketing accounts taking the rhythm. Nemesis Star is as cold as Wu Zhi at the moment."

"You can search on NASA and you will know that the last project team to explore the Nemesis star was disbanded last year due to lack of funds. The project mentor is now playing guitar and singing on tiktok every day-this is true."

Xu Yun: ".?"

Good guy.

I asked a question casually, is the follow-up content so exciting?

I don't know if he was aroused by Xu Yun's words, so Zhang Heguang continued to add:

"However, compared with the illusory second star in the solar system, the current research on the ninth planet is quite hot."

Xu Yun was taken aback for a moment, then quickly asked after recovering:

"How to say?"

Zhang Heguang thought for a while, reached into his trouser pocket, and took out his cell phone.

After tinkering a few times, he swiped out a page and handed it to Xu Yun:

"Here, it's still Mike Brown, the killer of Pluto. They recently discovered another asteroid with an abnormal orbit."

"And the deflection trajectory of this asteroid is higher than the original six examples. It is difficult to explain it by pure chance, so the probability of the ninth planet is raised immediately."

Xu Yun took the phone with some subtle emotions, and looked at it seriously.

as expected.

As Zhang Heguang said, Mike Brown's team, which has been on the Kuiper belt celestial body bar for many years, announced the discovery of an asteroid's orbital anomaly.

mentioned earlier.

At present, the most critical evidence supporting the existence of the ninth planet is the trajectory of the six stars Sedna, 2004 VN112, 2007 TG422, 2010 GB174, 2012 VP113, and 2013 RFS98.

The orbits of these six asteroids have some similarities, such as the tendency of the perihelion direction to gather in a certain direction, etc., and finally a common gravitational source can be deduced.

But this is pure data analysis, there are other theories to explain this situation.

Therefore, this topic has always been very controversial.

The result was unexpected.

Mike Brown, the killer of Pluto, actually discovered a new asteroid.

Of course.

This asteroid still cannot be regarded as substantive evidence, it can only be said that it makes the ninth planet more likely in mathematical calculations.

Then Xu Yun handed the phone back to Zhang Heguang, remained silent for a moment, and asked:

"Old Zhang, when was this discovery announced?"

Zhang Heguang took the phone, put it back into his trouser pocket after the screen was off, and recalled:

"It's been a while, maybe three or four months?"

When Xu Yun heard this, a trace of thought flashed in his eyes.

At this time, less than two months have passed since I returned to reality, which means that the discovery of Mike Brown's team should have nothing to do with the halo mission.

It's just that due to professional barriers, Xu Yun hadn't noticed this information before.

That seems like a pure coincidence.

On the other side, Zhang Heguang's voice still came slowly:

"So in the past few months, many laboratories at home and abroad have re-studied this topic."

"For example, across the sea, there are three project teams under NASA, and five from ESA. Counting various observatories and universities, the number should not be too small."

"There are probably six or seven project teams in the country. Of course, the number seems to be large, but in fact the approved funds are relatively limited-after all, it's just a probability."

Xu Yun nodded in understanding.

This is a well-understood situation—because there are just too many astronomical phenomena in the universe.

In the vast sky, there are countless examples more amazing than the deviation of the orbit of an asteroid.

Such as Tabby's star mutation, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the peaks of eternal light, etc., are all mysterious and shocking sights.

The anomaly of a certain star may be able to write a very good paper, but if you want to get a high amount of scientific research funding, the possibility is very low.

Then Xu Yun was silent for a moment, then continued to pretend to be nonchalant and asked a question:

"Tsk tsk, the ninth planet in the solar system, Lao Zhang, have you got any results from your laboratory?"

Although the Department of Astronomy of the University of Science and Technology of China is not well-known in the school, it is well-known in the industry.

For example, Purple Mountain Observatory, its postgraduate department has been assigned to the University of Science and Technology, and half of the domestic astronomical institutions are related to the University of Science and Technology.

Therefore, Xu Yun’s question sounds quite normal to Zhang Heguang—it is uncertain internationally, but if there is any domestic institution that is most likely to produce results on the ninth planet, then HKUST is obviously the best answer:

"Not yet. Two phases of images have just been sent from LAMOST, and the results of the part that have been released so far are not very optimistic."

Xu Yun was slightly taken aback:

"LAMOST?"

"What's wrong?"

Seeing Xu Yun's expression, Zhang Heguang quickly looked him up and down:

"If you dare to spray LAMOST, don't blame me for beating you."

Xu Yun quickly waved his hand:

"No, no, I just haven't heard of LAMOST for a long time, don't think too much."

Speaking of Huaxia's well-known telescopes, a word may pop up in most people's minds:

Guizhou Tianyan.

That is the 500-meter aperture radio telescope FAST.

But in addition to FAST, Huaxia also has several well-known telescopes.

For example, the 25-meter-aperture radio telescope in Shanghai,

Purple Mountain Observatory Qinghai Delingha 13.7-meter comprehensive aperture millimeter-wave radio telescope,

as well as

The large sky area multi-objective fiber optic spectroscopic telescope with mixed reputation, LAMOST.

The LAMOST project was initiated in 1997, started construction in 2001, and passed the national acceptance in June 2009.

In April 2010, it was named "Guo Shoujing Telescope", and in September 2012, it launched a formal sky survey.

It is a major scientific and technological infrastructure with a high investment in our country. However, after it is put into operation, it has exposed a big problem:

In effect she fell short of the set goal, and the survey beyond the galaxy, that is, the outer part of the galaxy, was an almost complete failure.

Because extragalactic galaxies are much darker than stars, the LAMOST design magnitude is 20.5, but the actual survey magnitude of LAMOST can only reach 18. As mentioned earlier, the magnitude is very special, the lower the magnitude, the brighter it is.

You should know.

Galaxies brighter than magnitude 17.7 have been completely observed by SDSS.

In other words, the nova discovered by LAMOST is at most between 17.7-18.0.

As of June 2017.

LAMOST has actually observed more than 3 million extragalactic objects, but in the end only obtained effective spectra of 150,000 galaxies and 50,000 quasars, which is only 2% of the original spectrum of tens of millions of extragalactic objects.

So from the established goal, it is a relatively failure.

But on the other hand.

There are mixed reputations and reputations, but what about reputations?

That is, although LAMOST stretched its hips in the outer galaxy, the effect in Hanoi has reached the top in the world.

Well, not only top-notch, but top-notch.

LAMOST is comparable to other stellar surveys in the world, such as apogee in SDSS IV, in terms of Milky Way science.

He has made outstanding contributions to the research on special stars, the weighing of the Milky Way, and dark matter in the solar field.

So all the time.

The controversy about LAMOST never dissipated.

One side of diss means that the universe is so vast, and the Milky Way is just a very small corner, at most it is the entrance of the house.

To invest so much and not see beyond the door is an irrefutable failure.

Those who support it think that we originally wanted to shoot a rabbit, but the rabbit missed it and hit a pheasant. This is actually no different - the Milky Way is big enough for humans, and it’s not bad to be able to study stars in the system okay?

The Department of Astronomy of HKUST has contributed a lot to LAMOST, so for the students of the Department of Astronomy of HKUST, LAMOST naturally has its own filter.

The topic returns to reality.

Seeing that Xu Yun really didn't have any mocking expression, Zhang Heguang just nodded:

"Although the effect of LAMOST in extragalactic galaxies is mediocre, there are not many that can surpass it in the Milky Way, even internationally."

"So if nothing else happens, there will still be no new discoveries on the ninth planet in the short term."

As he spoke, he suddenly thought of something, and half-jokingly said to Xu Yun:

"Why don't you come to my group to help, Old Xu, there are tens of millions of photos to analyze."

The "photograph" mentioned by Zhang Heguang is slightly different from the photo in the concept of reality. It is an observation record composed of wave bands.

The science and technology in 2022 is different from that of the wheat copy in 1850. In the copy, all observatories around the world can only collect 30,000 observation records in one year, but in 2022, it can achieve a nearly infinite magnitude.

in 2022.

The general astronomical telescope mode is as follows:

Take a lot of photos, first remove the cosmic rays, then subtract the background, subtract the dark current, and remove the flat field to get black and white photos of the wavelength band.

Finally, the multi-band photos are given a false color and then combined, and you can see those photos that you see on the Internet.

So don't look at the fact that Hubble only transmits 120G of information per week. In fact, it is all band content, and the number after analysis is unimaginable-it's just that most of it is useless.

The task of Zhang Heguang and the others is to screen moving celestial bodies through these pictures.

For example, if the interval of photos is 20 minutes, then an algorithm needs to be used to screen whether there are stars in the photos that are displaced at a speed of XX arc seconds-because the stars are not moving.

The moving ones are either asteroids, large planets in or outside the system, or comets, or .

alien.

It's just that the scale of the universe is too large, and comets or meteorites often appear in the solar system.

Therefore, even with the assistance of supercomputers, this kind of screening work is still very difficult.

side of the observatory.

Hearing Zhang Heguang's words, Xu Yun was taken aback again.

Then he looked at Zhang Heguang seriously for a few seconds, and confirmed:

"Old Zhang, are you kidding me?—Let me tell you, my buddies are really interested in this matter."

"Are you kidding me? This is not a high-secret research."

Zhang Heguang rolled his eyes at him and explained:

"This job is to use computer computing power to analyze pictures. Although our department is small, we undertake a lot of projects, so there is not much computing power left for me."

"Like last week, can you believe it when I only got 5,000 cores?"

"If you are willing to help, it will be too late today, let's do it tomorrow, and I will add you to the group tomorrow."

"To tell you the truth, I have borrowed the computers of several of my juniors. Ahem, they all offered to help."

"High and low is just an analysis program. It is open source to the outside world. Just go to the website of the Academy of Sciences and download it. Don't mention you who are engaged in physics, anyone who engages in geography can participate."

Looking at the swearing Zhang Heguang, Xu Yun's face remained calm, but his mood was slightly subtle.

This counts.

When you want to sleep, someone sent Maple Flower Love?

To know.

Today he seems to be leading a team to visit the observatory, but the actual purpose is to inquire about the news of the planet Shenwang.

According to Xu Yun's original plan.

If the research on the ninth planet in the solar system is relatively slow in the current astronomical community, then everything has to be considered in the long run.

However, if its popularity is moderate in the near future, then you can find an opportunity to intervene.

The result was unexpected.

Thanks to Mike Brown's new discovery, this research direction has regained its popularity, and even the University of Science and Technology has participated in it.

In this way.

The hidden color on Xu Yun's body reached the highest level at once.

Therefore, in just a few seconds, Xu Yun had a decision in his heart.

He looked at Zhang Heguang and said seriously:

"Son, take Dad with you."