評論
打印
We had to get lucky in a lot of different ways. And sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good.
在很多方面我們都需要幸運的眷顧。有時，運氣比正確操作更重要。
In this case, we were both, I like to think. But light had to come from the black hole.
我認為這一次，我們不但操作正確，運氣也很好。但我們需要接收來自黑洞的光線。
It had to come through intergalactic space, through the Earth's atmosphere, where water vapor can absorb it,
它必須穿過星際空間。穿過地球的大氣層，中途還有可能被水蒸氣吸收，
and everything worked out perfectly, the size of the Earth at that wavelength of light, one millimeter wavelength,
但一切都非常完美。地球的大小，在波長一毫米的光線下，
was just right to resolve that black hole, 55 million light-years away. The universe was telling us what to do.
正好能夠展現5500萬光年外那個黑洞的樣子。宇宙正在告訴我們應該做什么。
So you started capturing huge amounts of data. I think this is like half the data from just one telescope.
所以你們開始收集海量的數據。這些只是其中一臺望遠鏡所收集的數據的一半？
Yeah, this is one of the members of our team, Lindy Blackburn,
是的，這是我們小組的一員，林迪·布萊克本，
and he's sitting with half the data recorded at the Large Millimeter Telescope, which is atop a 15,000-foot mountain in Mexico.
在他旁邊的是大型毫米波望遠鏡記錄下的一半的數據，這架望遠鏡位于墨西哥一座近5000米高的山上。
And what he's holding there is about half a petabyte.
他手上拿著的數據大約有拍字節的一半。
Which, to put it in terms that we might understand, it's about 5,000 people's lifetime selfie budget.
用易于想象的東西來比喻的話，大約能存放5千人一輩子的自拍照。
It's a lot of data. So this was all shipped, you couldn't send this over the internet.
數據非常多。所以只能通過線下運輸，你們沒辦法在互聯網上傳輸。
All this data was shipped to one place and the massive computer effort began to try and analyze it.
所有的數據都被運送到一個地方，然后計算機開始解析這些數據。
And you didn't really know what you were going to see coming out of this.
當時你并不知道最終的結果是什么樣的。
The way this technique works that we used --
我們是這么工作的。
imagine taking an optical mirror and smashing it and putting all the shards in different places.
想象打碎一面鏡子，然后把所有的碎片四散開來。
The way a normal mirror works is the light rays bounce off the surface,
普通鏡子的工作原理是通過鏡面反射，
which is perfect, and they focus in a certain point at the same time.
所有的光在同時聚焦在某個特定的點。
We take all these recordings, and with atomic clock precision we align them perfectly, later in a supercomputer.
我們有了所有的數據，在原子鐘精度的幫助下，我們將這些數據準確輸入超級計算機。
And we recreate kind of an Earth-sized lens. And the only way to do that is to bring the data back by plane.
然后我們重構了一個地球大小的透鏡。只能通過飛機運送數據。
