The camera moved from the ground to the night sky, the boundless black turned into a blue nebula, and six "pulsars" appeared one after another, making a special sound.
This is a scene from the live broadcast room of the "Searching for the Heartbeat of the Universe" pulsar concert on the evening of September 23. The "voices" of the six pulsars discovered by AI-assisted China Tianyan FAST were announced for the first time. Netizens heard the sound from tens of thousands of light years The audio signal of an outer celestial body, a distant but intimate sound. These sounds are converted from radio signals emitted by pulsars and are known as "cosmic heartbeats."
Pulsars, first detected in 1967, were one of the four major discoveries of astronomy in the 1960s. On the evening of the 23rd, this distant celestial body was so close to humans-a "ceremony" with a "cosmic-level romance" color, so that astronomy, a professional and niche knowledge, was followed by 6 million netizens.
Behind this is a longer trek, about the "scientific popularization" of "scientific and technological innovation".
In October 2015, just as the construction of the "China Sky Eye" FAST project entered the final sprint stage of the hoisting of the reflector unit, someone asked a question on Zhihu: What is the significance of China's building the world's largest radio telescope with a diameter of 500 meters to search for alien civilizations? ?
Under this question, an astronomy popular science blogger replied: "There are a lot of things that this telescope can do. Most taxpayers only see or understand the three words "alien".
Although every space exploration will inspire a "astronomy craze" at the public level, it is undeniable that astronomy is still an "unpopular" subject. The distance between stories and ordinary people is still far away.
"China Sky Eye" FAST, the largest astronomical project in China's history
But "unpopular" astronomy represents the original curiosity and imagination of human beings.
In the eyes of Wang Shen, who graduated from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Computer Science and Technology of Fudan University, astronomy is both an ancient discipline and a young discipline; at the same time, it is both an expensive discipline and a "Inclusive" discipline.
It is said to be ancient because from our ancestors, we began to look up at the stars to guide human life, and many observation methods of the ancients are still applicable today; it is said to be young because of the application of mathematical and physical methods and advanced observation. The advancement of tools in recent decades has allowed the explosive development of this discipline;
It is expensive because cutting-edge astronomical achievements are highly dependent on expensive observation equipment; it is "inclusive" because we can see the starry sky as long as we look up, and any thinking about the starry sky can improve our scientific literacy.
How to do a good job in astronomy popularization, let the public understand their work, and even stimulate their enthusiasm for science, this is the question that the FAST team and astronomers need to answer.
FAST's Road to Popular Science
"FAST is such a 'pot', if you put it on rice, maybe everyone in the world can have 2 bowls." On the scene of CCTV's "Let's Talk" in 2020, Li Di made a scene for the audience and the audience in front of the TV. Interesting science about FAST.
Li Di, who was then the deputy chief engineer of the FAST project and later took over from Nan Rendong as the chief scientist of the FAST project, has been involved in the FAST project since 2007. In 2012, he returned to China full-time and devoted himself to FAST. under construction.
In addition to being a "scientist", he is also a "science scientist". On CCTV's "Let's Talk", Dragon TV's "Future China" and other TV programs, Li Di often incarnates as a "tenth-level joker", using vivid and humorous language to popularize science to the public, what else can FAST do besides looking for aliens.
One of them is the discovery and study of pulsars. Pulsars are highly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars formed by massive stars that undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives and are second only to black holes in matter density. It is characterized by a regular and stable signal. When the polar cap of the pulsar turns to the direction of the earth's line of sight, we can detect its radiation signal.
To make an image metaphor, pulsars are like beacons for navigation, and they are also the goals that astronomy and physicists are diligently pursuing and studying.
Navigation on Earth requires GPS, and interstellar navigation requires pulsars. Through pulsars, the position of the spacecraft in the universe can be obtained. For a long time, pulsars have been the frontier research objects of astronomy and physics, and can be used for gravitational wave detection, black holes and other related research. Helps answer many big physics questions. Since pulsars are mainly detected in the radio band, the discovery and research of pulsars is one of the key scientific goals of large radio telescopes in the world, and it is also a must for scientific frontier exploration.
The full name of FAST is the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. It is not only the world's largest single-antenna radio telescope, but also has a sensitivity that other radio telescopes cannot match. Therefore, it has also become an astronomical researcher. The "Pulsar Discovery Tool" in the eyes.
To better educate the public about this feature, the FAST team began trying to convert the observed pulsar signals into audio a few years ago. A few years ago, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences sent a "vinyl disc" to undergraduate freshmen in the admission letter, and the CD recorded the audio signals of 15 pulsars captured by China Sky Eye FAST.
And this special cross-border form will have a new presentation three years later, and the individual musical works will become a special "popular science concert". But before that, in addition to popular science, the FAST team was thinking about an equally important thing. They encountered a problem in the detection of pulsars.
new "entrants"
Theoretically speaking, it only takes three steps to discover a new pulsar: the first step, observing the sky with a radio telescope; the second step, recording the signal; and the third step: finding a periodic stable signal that meets the conditions. But just like the problem of "putting an elephant in the refrigerator", the simpler the steps, the more complicated the realization process tends to be.
The problem that the FAST team encountered was in the third step: how to find qualified signals from the massive observational data. FAST receives the faint radio signal of the pulsar, and after a series of physical processing, it will be converted into a "signal map", and scientists need to screen the pulsar candidates by "recognizing the map".
It is estimated that Sky Eye FAST produces about 500TB of observational data every week. After preprocessing these data, about 30-100 million signal maps will be generated. It is difficult to quickly process such a huge amount of data with the FAST team's own technical model alone. data.
FAST receives radio signals from pulsars and converts them into "signal maps"
Just when the FAST team was thinking about how to improve the efficiency of signal processing, a brainstorm was underway at Tencent Youtu Lab in Shanghai.
The theme of the brainstorm is "AI For Science": how AI can be combined with basic science. The results discussed at the meeting are expected to become the next innovative exploration direction of Tencent Youtu. Many innovative solutions have been proposed, including virtual twins, optical computing, and new materials.
In the end, the "AI + astronomy" plan proposed by a young researcher Wang Yabiao became the prototype of the later "star exploration plan".
Wang Yabiao is also an astronomy enthusiast. He learned that the National Astronomical Observatory used "image recognition" to screen pulsar candidates. The complex "star exploration" problem can be transformed into an AI computer recognition problem, and this is exactly what Tencent What Youtu is good at. At the same time, massive data processing requires powerful cloud computing power, and Tencent Cloud can help.
Soon, Wang Yabiao and Li Di met, and the two hit it off. They joined the School of Computer Science and Technology of Fudan University, which had done research on AI star exploration before, to start a star search journey. Through Tencent's "Cloud + AI" Blessing and helping FAST detect pulsars, the "Star Exploration Program" was officially launched.
The cooperation was smoother than expected. AI helped FAST to increase the search rate of pulsars by 120 times, and soon ushered in the first announcement of the results: 22 pulsars were discovered, and the search for pulsars in the extragalactic galaxy M31 Andromeda was launched. The deepest complete detection of a compact-like object.
But that's not all Tencent's "entry" - an exciting result, but the next problem.
The Sea of Stars is beautiful, but for ordinary people, astronomy is niche and professional, and most people don’t understand it. Pulsars are even more incompatible with ordinary people’s lives. “If no one pays attention to the Sea of Stars, it will change. It became a carnival in the niche circle."
"We need a popular science. About pulsars, about FAST, about AI star exploration." Tencent decided to join the "popular science tour" that astronomers have been doing, because technological innovation and scientific popularization are equally important.
cosmic heartbeat
There are many ways to popularize science, and the key is how to make ordinary people pay attention and participate.
Soon, the "special popular science form" that the FAST team was trying attracted the attention of the Tencent team members-about the fact that pulsars can "sing". They also found that the pulsar audio on the vinyl disc of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences sounded like different "musical drum beats."
"Let's do a concert with the sound converted from the pulsar signal!" Someone in the team was inspired by this idea and came up with a new idea. The audioization of astronomical data has a successful precedent, but it is rare to use the sound of a pulsar for a concert. I have heard.
In the past two years, the live broadcast of various online concerts has often been out of the circle and has become the most popular form for the public. Through the form of online concerts, more ordinary people can understand the scientific and technological innovation value of AI and other technologies for pulsar research, and understand China's astronomy. The new ideas are in line with everyone's original intention of doing science popularization and are quickly adopted.
The team quickly found Wang Shen, one of the founders of the star exploration program, and asked about the possibility of audio conversion from pulsar radio signals. Wang Shen graduated from the National Astronomical Observatory, and he also developed a new technical path in the audio conversion of pulsar signals: "Based on the short-term observation data of FAST drift scanning, a new technical path can be used to realize the conversion of pulsar data. Audio, and then compose a complete music" - making the pulsars discovered by AI "sing" has become his new task.
It's just different from the past. In this concert, pulsars are the protagonists. The sound of pulsars, which sounded like "the heartbeat of the universe", became the theme of the concert.
Talking about the most hard-core technologies in the most popular way, the project members are preparing to hold a "popular science concert" combining science and art.
a special concert
All light takes time to be seen.
On September 23, the live broadcast of the "Searching for the Heartbeat of the Universe" pulsar concert started.
The pulsed audio signal used by the musicians in the concert came from the 22 pulsars discovered by the "Star Exploration Project". In some songs, the "heartbeat" of 8 pulsars can even be "heard". In the eyes of musician Gao Shan, this romance from pulsars is more practical. "Maybe, let's pass the vibration of science to everyone through the vibration of music."
The three main creative members of the "Star Exploration Program", together with sky photographers and 7 emerging musicians, talked about starry sky and pulsar exploration together, and conducted public science on astronomical phenomena, pulsar detection, and scientific and technological exploration of the universe. More than 6 million people The audience perceives the heartbeat of pulsars online and listens to the story of exploring the universe with AI. In the "Longest Encore", the slow live broadcast of the starry sky in many places, many netizens watched the stars and made wishes in the live broadcast room, and the radio anchor introduced the netizens' thoughts into space through universe-related music, movies, and literary topics. This "encore" ended at 5:00 a.m., and the "cosmic heartbeat" from pulsars kept going all night in the live room.
"From one to five in the morning, this time the universe not only flashes for you, but also plays for you." In the live broadcast room, someone rewrote a classic line from "Three-Body Problem".
The main creators of the Star Exploration Program explain pulsars on the spot (from left to right: Wang Shen, postdoctoral fellow of Chi Mingmin's research group, School of Computer Science and Technology, Fudan University) (graduated from the National Astronomical Observatory), Wang Yabiao, an expert researcher at Tencent Youtu Laboratory, and Fudan University Computer Science Chi Mingmin, associate professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Technology, and Tang Yi, host of The Paper)
Regarding the concert, Chi Mingmin, an associate professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology of Fudan University, believes that it is an "interesting and very effective" form of popular science. The mysteries of the universe have always inspired human curiosity and imagination. She also hopes that all sectors of society can make more innovative attempts in popular science education, so as to stimulate the curiosity of young people and devote themselves to the exploration from 0 to 1. Chi Mingmin talked about his previous experience in South Africa and was surprised by the maturity of the local astronomy popularization promotion, "They have tents in the next lap of the observatory, which is where people come to look up at the stars, so popular science can try in the form of Various. Good science should be interesting science.”
Wang Yabiao remembered a book called "Alien Answers 101" that he read when he was about 10 years old. From this book, he learned the concept of "light years" and developed an interest in astronomy. He thought that maybe another child would have an "astronomical dream" when he saw today's concert.
In the future, UTU Lab will consider, on the basis of the "Star Exploration Program", to carry out continuous popularization of cases combining AI technology and astronomy, and continue to explore new popularization methods to spread AI technology and astronomical knowledge to young people.
Netizens interact in the "Longest Encore" live broadcast
This is good news for FAST, which has spent a lot of energy on popular science before.
As Bacon said, the power of knowledge depends not only on its own value, but also on whether it is transmitted, and the breadth and depth of transmission. Having a new force like Tencent Youtu Lab who understands both technology and communication to assist scientists in science popularization will not only help reduce the burden on scientists and promote the output of more scientific results, but also hopefully stimulate the participation and interest of more young people.
This is also the value of the combination of AI and basic science - just like the plot of the movie "Wind Whisperer", no matter how small a language is, it will also play an inestimable huge role; and with the blessing of AI, it was in the minority before. The "dialogue with the stars" that only human beings can understand will also attract more people to devote themselves to it, bursting out more splendid brilliance.
On January 5, 2022, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a press conference. The expected news is that "China Sky Eye" is considering opening 1% of the observation time to primary and secondary school students across the country, "give them a head-up view of the world. The basics."
Nan Rendong, the "Father of China's Sky Eye" once said: "The Sky Eye is built for the next generation." On September 13, 2017, when FAST first discovered the first pulsar, Li Di gave the patient who was in hospital. Nan Rendong sent a brief email to report on this milestone. Although Li Di has not yet been able to confirm whether Nan Rendong saw the email, he believes that with the help of new technologies such as AI, the new generation of astronomers can have far more imagination than the current generation, and use the eyes of the sky to achieve better results. big score.
(Text source: Lei Feng.com)