演讲MP3+双语文稿:有史以来最详细的星系、黑洞和恒星地图
听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:有史以来最详细的星系、黑洞和恒星地图，希望你会喜欢！
[演讲者及介绍]Juna Kollmeier
理论天体物理学家Juna Kollmeier使用了天文学中已知的所有技术——数学、计算机和来自地面和太空望远镜的数据——试图通过绘制大规模的恒星、星系和黑洞的地图来了解宇宙是如何形成的。
[演讲主题]有史以来最详细的星系、黑洞和恒星地图
[中英文字幕]
翻译者 Yolanda Zhang 校对者 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.
当我还是孩子时，我很惧怕黑暗。黑暗是怪兽出没的地方。我的卧室外面有一盏小小的夜灯，这样我的房间就不会一片漆黑。但是随着时间推移，我对黑暗的恐惧变成了好奇。黑暗中都有什么？我发现 数千年来，人类一直在试图探索黑暗，这种好奇心可能永远不会消逝。我们知道这一点，是因为我们找到了祖先们试图绘制星空位置的古老遗迹。
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.
这是我们作为星系中的一个物种来解决问题的标志。我们了解我们的星球，能治愈我们的疾病，会烹饪我们的食物，甚至还能离开我们的星球进入太空。但这并不容易。探索宇宙是一场战斗。充满艰辛，变幻无穷，我们所有人都置身其中。这是一场在黑暗中对抗黑暗的战斗。这就是猎户座拥有武器的原因。无论如何，如果你要参与这场战斗，就需要了解身处的战场。
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.
测绘天空地图的核心包括三个基本要素。有发光的观测对象，有收集光线的望远镜，还有帮助你分析理解这些光线的仪器。我们当中很多人都用眼睛观测过月相图，眼睛是很基础的望远镜。我们也理解了大脑扮演着什么样的角色，大脑就是最基础的分析仪器。如果你和一个朋友在一起，花费30多年的时间，你就能绘制出1000 颗恒星极其精确的图像。你要把前线搬到战场上去。这就是第谷·布拉赫和他的伙伴，确切的说是他的助手，约翰尼斯·开普勒在17世纪所做的。他们移动了这条线，弄清楚了行星的运动轨迹，它们是如何围绕太阳运转的。
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.
但直到大约100年前，我们才意识到这个宇宙很大。宇宙看起来是无边无际的，事实也确实如此，但是可观测的宇宙是有限的。这意味着我们可以赢得这场战斗。但如果你要绘制宇宙地图，叫上一两个好朋友是不够的。绘制宇宙地图需要一支军队，一支充满好奇心、富有创造力、技艺精湛的军队，他们齐心协力，就可以完成非凡的任务。我领导着这支创意大军，参加了第五代斯隆数字巡天项目，简称SDSS。这就是天文学家们如何在工业时代成功的：他们激发了个人的好奇心，保留了个人探索的能力，同时投入巨大的机器来真正推进探索的边界。
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，我们将天空分割成三个探索区域：一个探索恒星，一个探索黑洞，一个探索星系。我的测绘范围包含两个半球，5个望远镜，或者11个，取决于你怎么计数，10个摄谱仪以及数百万个观测对象。这真是一个庞然大物。下面我们来看看这几个区域。
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.
银河系有2500亿颗恒星，误差可能有几千亿。这个数字大到难以想象。这个数字对任何人来说都没有实际意义。生活中根本见不到这么大的数字。我们离测绘出所有这些恒星的分布还差得远。所以我们必须聚焦最有趣的那些。在SDSS-V中，我们正在测绘600万颗恒星的图像，我们认为可以测算它们的年龄。因为如果你能测算一颗恒星的年龄，那就像在银河系里分布着六百万个时钟。有了这些信息，我们就可以揭开银河系的历史和化石记录，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.
我直接切入正题。黑洞是宇宙中最令人困惑的物质之一。为什么? 因为它们几乎是数学实体化的结果，以一种我们几乎无法理解的物理形式存在着。就像数字0的动画影像在我们身边走来走去一样。那太奇怪了。而黑洞的存在更令人匪夷所思。它不像一个篮球，不是把它塞进一个小点，密度就变得非常大。被压缩的篮球好歹还有表面，这些东西没有表面，我们现在已经知道黑洞这点了。因为我们见过黑洞，或者应该说，我们看到它没有表面。黑洞最有意思的地方在于，我们可以通过研究穿过一个没有信息返回的点的物质来充分了解黑洞。因为在那个点，该物质会发射出大量的X射线、可见光、紫外线和无线电波。我们可以知道这些黑洞是如何膨胀的。在SDSS中，我们观察了超过50万个超大质量黑洞，试图了解它们是如何形成的。
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.
就像我说的，我们生活在银河系，你们都很熟悉。银河系是个十分普通的星系，没有任何光怪陆离的现象。而这正是我们的家乡，这一点很不错。我们认为银河系，以及所有的银河系，在过去都发生了惊心动魄的爆炸。就好比你认识的每个普通人都曾是朋克摇滚的叛逆少年。这是非常奇怪的。恒星在这些系统中爆炸，中心形成了黑洞，并释放出巨大的能量。这是怎么发生的，这种变化是怎么发生的? 而在SDSS，我们要深入这些星系怪物的内部，一路上将观察到的景象放大，看看这些过程在哪里发生，以便了解恒星变成黑洞的过程。
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.
这些是我的研究设备。这是我的两个大望远镜。新墨西哥州的阿帕奇点天文台拥有斯隆望远镜，智利的拉斯坎帕纳斯天文台拥有2.5米宽的杜邦望远镜。2.5米是我们镜子的大小，这对第谷和开普勒来说是很大的，但是以今天的标准来看它实际上没有那么大，还有更大的望远镜。但在SDSS中，我们在这些旧望远镜上连接了新仪器，使它们变得更有趣。我们把所有这些观测对象的光都捕捉到光圈里，让这些光聚焦在焦平面上，我们的仪器就在那里处理这些光。
08:30
What's new in SDSS-V is that we're makingthe focal plane entirely robotic. That's right: robots.
SDSS-V 的创新之处 在于我们将焦平面完全变成了机器人。没错：机器人。
08:39
(Laughter)
（笑声）
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.
这就是它们在天空中运动的方式。这些是我们的观测对象和一个恒星场，这样就看到了恒星，星系，黑洞。机器人移动到我们经过的那些观测对象，为了从这些恒星，星系和黑洞——是的，黑洞——捕捉光线。捕捉黑洞的光线很奇怪，但我刚刚就说过黑洞就是个奇怪的现象。
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.
还有一件事。恒星一直在爆炸，就像这颗1987年在我们“宇宙后院”中爆炸的恒星。黑洞的规模一直在变大。天空在每天晚上都会焕然一新。这意味着我们不能只测绘一次，必须再反复几次。所以在SDSS-V中，我们要多次回到天空的每个部分，为了看看这些观测对象是如何随着时间变化的。因为这些时间上的变化蕴含了物理原理，蕴含了这些观测对象形成和变化的秘密。这一步就是“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.
现在我们来总结一下。全球巡视，两个半球，5个望远镜，10个摄谱仪，数以百万计的观测对象，“修整天空”，创造性的军队，机器人，就是这些。你可能觉得不可思议。她的团队一定是包揽了太空测绘工作，没有空间留给个人，留给好奇的天才，对吧? 那你就大错特错了。
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.
来认识一下哈尼天体。哈尼·冯·阿科尔曾经是一名荷兰教师，她在分析SDSS数据的公共版本时，发现了这种极其罕见的星体形态，现在成为了我们的主要研究对象。她之所以能做到这一点，是因为SDSS自成立以来，根据斯隆基金会的授权，已将其数据向大众公开，广大群众都可以使用。她只是个普通公民，很了不起，为她鼓掌吧。
11:15
(Applause)
（掌声）
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.
哈尼是一个草根科学家，我喜欢叫他们这样的人“公民战士”。她的例子说明你不需要成为一个杰出天体物理学家也能参与其中。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.
几年前，我四岁的孩子问：“月亮也有月亮吗？”我开始准备认真回答这个问题，因为尽管许多四岁左右的孩子一直都在问这个问题，但许多专家，包括我自己，都不知道答案。这只是告诉你们，还有很多基本问题需要去探索答案。
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.
这就引出了关于SDSS最重要的一点。没错，恒星，星系，黑洞，机器人——这些都非常酷。但最酷的是，在一个非常普通的星系中，围绕着一颗非常普通的恒星，一群不起眼的生物（人类）在瓦砾堆上能够赢得探索它们世界的战斗。
12:47
(Cheers) (Applause)
（欢呼）（掌声）
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?
我在这里展示的是自1980年以来，天文学家在大型巡天过程中测绘出的星系数量。如果我们继续沿着这条线走，到2060年我们将绘制出可观测宇宙中每一个大星系的样貌。想想看。想想看吧：在几千年的时间里，我们已经完成了从整理蛤壳到广义相对论，再到整理SDSS的跨越——如果我们再坚持40年，将可以绘制出所有星系的样貌。但前提是我们必须坚持下去。我们能做出这样的选择吗？
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.
这个世界上有一些黑暗势力，它们将剥夺我们整个物种理解宇宙的权利。不要惧怕黑暗。反击。加入我们的行列。
13:51
Thank you.
谢谢大家！
13:52
(Applause)
（掌声）
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