Chapter 118 Sgr A*
Bai Yang immediately informed his father of this important discovery.
Dad was calm and composed. He waved his hand and said, "What kind of major discovery is this? It's no big deal. The painting on the wall is gone. It's just that the putty has been scraped off. Something will definitely happen in the future and you will have to scrape off all the putty in your room and repaint it. Do you believe it?"
If you don't believe me, I'll leave it to you. Come back and see if this really happens.
Dad acted like a prophet.
Bai Yang scratched his head. After he found that the image on the wall disappeared, he imagined the plot of a science fiction blockbuster with tens of thousands of words, parallel universes, multiple histories, world line jumps, plot twists and turns, and it was so touching that Gumburton Taro was about to be possessed and was ready to cross the worlds to save Makise Kurisu and Dodoru, but his father revealed the secret.
Bai Yang turned his gaze towards Uncle Wang who was sitting beside the coffee table.
Old Wang didn't even raise his head, showing no interest in what Bai Yang said. He was only concerned with signing his name on the article written by Xiao Zhu.
Bai Yang had no choice but to turn his head and look back.
Lian Qiao leaned against the door, spread out his hands and shrugged.
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Zhao Bowen is in a meeting.
It’s not at the provincial or municipal party committee, but at the Purple Mountain Observatory.
He had been in a normal meeting today, reporting on the headquarters' current work progress, but suddenly he received a message from Purple Tower. He quietly opened his phone and saw that there was a major discovery. So Lao Zhao threw the manuscript away, pushed the table, dragged the chair, and ran away, leaving the leaders dumbfounded.
The leader quietly asked his secretary if his house was on fire.
"Can it be clearer?" Zhao Bowen frowned. There was a photo on the PPT and a stack of photos on the table in front of him.
"Uh... Mr. Zhao, you also studied physics, so you know..."
"I just want to know, can it be clearer?" Zhao Bowen interrupted him.
The background of the photo is black, with a few sparse white dots on the black background, like chalk dust sprinkled on a blackboard, and there is also a dark red arrow pointing to a dim dot in the center of the photo.
The label below is Sgr A*.
Even Zhao Bowen, a complete layman in astronomy, knew that Sgr A* was Sagittarius A*. The sesame-pea-sized spot in the photo was actually a supermassive black hole with a mass four million times that of the sun. It was not visible at all sitting in the conference room, and Zhao Bowen could not imagine how big a star with a mass four million times that of the sun must be. Fortunately, the director explained that it was a black hole, not a star, so even though its mass was as great as four million suns, its diameter was actually only 40 million kilometers.
The photo in Zhao Bowen's hand is an enlarged version of Sgr A*, with lower clarity and black and white colors. If you enlarge the dim white dot on the PPT several hundred times, it is the photo in Zhao Bowen's hand. The clarity is even blurrier than black sesame paste, but the structure can still be roughly seen - it is a fuzzy, hazy circle without any details.
Old Zhao inexplicably recalled the big eye he saw that night. It was a similar pupil. This association made Zhao Bowen shudder. Isn't the characteristic of a black hole that even light cannot escape similar to that eye? When Zhao Bowen looked directly into that huge eye, he felt that he was looking into the abyss.
This photo is the result of the work of the Yueyu astronomy team over the past few years.
The astronomy group undertook the most important but also the most confusing task among all the expert groups, which was to analyze and determine the possible source of the black moon. The teacher's draft had already pointed out the direction - the Milky Way. The black moon came from the Milky Way, not native to the earth. This was a crucial clue and very reliable, as reliable as the teachers telling you before the exam that the scope of the exam would be the entire book.
With this clue, the astronomy team also felt that it was Kaopu's mother who mourned Kaopu and that Kaopu was dead.
After careful inference, precise analysis, devout prayers and blind voting (blind voting is also an important part of scientific research), everyone agreed that the most valuable target is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, so the cameras on Earth turned their fire on the center of the Milky Way - hey, you know what, there was some gain.
They found that the fine shadow structure of Sagittarius A* was not quite the same as expected, and there might be multiple gravitational sources interfering outside the accretion disk. Further observations in the X-ray frequency band revealed that part of the energy was missing.
Although Zitai repeatedly emphasized that this could be a natural phenomenon, after all, the universe is so vast that nothing is impossible, Zhao Bowen was already slamming the table excitedly: Black hole city! This is a black hole city! (Note 1) The black moon came from here!
“Is this the latest achievement?”
Zhao Bowen calmed down.
"It's an old achievement. In the astronomical community, the study of supermassive black holes is a prominent discipline. We and our colleagues in Europe and America have been working on it, including UCLA and the Max Planck Institute. Didn't they just take the world's first photo of a black hole in the first half of this year? They built an EHT, called the Event Horizon Telescope, and also used VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) technology. They took a photo of the supermassive black hole in the Virgo M87 galaxy. That black hole is very large, 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun. The virtual aperture of their telescope is equivalent to the diameter of the earth."
"Can it be requisitioned?" This was the first thing Zhao Bowen thought of.
"Teacher Zhao, that's from abroad." Someone reminded in a low voice.
"Can we cooperate?" Zhao Bowen changed the words.
"We have already cooperated." The reporter replied, "This observation plan has contacted the eight radio telescopes of EHT, but the time is too short and the plan is hasty, so this is the only effect we can achieve at present. After all, they have been preparing for ten years to photograph the black hole of M87."
"We need to see more clearly." Zhao Bowen tapped the wooden table with his knuckles.
"It is possible, but it requires a longer baseline and longer observation time." The speaker on the stage said, "The results we have seen so far are the result of cooperation between Beijing's LAMOST, Miyun, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and several telescopes in Australia, North America and South America. This intercontinental cooperation has already created the largest baseline on Earth. The baseline cannot be extended any further, so we can only extend the observation time."
"We don't have ten years. After ten years, the opportunity will be gone." Zhao Bowen shook his head. "We can only make the telescope a little bigger."
Zhao Bowen pushed his glasses and showed the excellent qualities of a party A: I don’t care what you do, I just need you to do it.
But telescopes with an aperture of the diameter of the earth are not enough, so how can we make a telescope with a larger aperture?
"I roughly understand what VLBI is. Multiple radio telescopes are networked to form a virtual large-aperture telescope. If we can move the telescope far enough, the aperture of the virtual telescope will be larger," Zhao Bowen said. "So we might as well use the Earth's revolution. The Earth itself is moving, and the movement of the Earth itself can form a huge baseline. Ideally, the baseline can be as long as the diameter of the Earth's revolution, which is about two astronomical units."
Zhao Bowen added excitedly:
"This is similar to a telescope with an aperture as large as the Earth's orbit!"
"But VLBI requires simultaneity..."
Someone reminded weakly.
"It's definitely difficult and requires technical breakthroughs. I know everyone can solve the problem." Zhao Bowen ignored the protests of the astronomy group and opened the second folder. "Okay, let's start the second topic."
Zhao Bowen glanced down.
"How do we get Voyager and Pioneer back? What ideas do you have? Feel free to speak up. If you have a plan, please come forward."
"Clatter--" There was a sharp sound of chair legs rubbing against each other, and everyone in the conference room took a step back in unison.
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(Note 1: Black hole city, proposed by the famous physicist Roger Penrose in 1969, refers to a structure surrounding a black hole that can use the strange physical properties of the event horizon to obtain energy.)
(End of this chapter)
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