#太平洋电脑网#什么鬼:我们已知的最怪异恒星的故事( 二 )


这些记录数据有几百TB之多 , 所以天文学家使用精确设定好的电脑程序来筛选这些信息 , 以寻找系外行星的踪迹 。 这些程序非常有效率 , 比以往任何天文学家团队处理信息的速度都要快得多 。 但是它们也并不完美 。 有时候 , 这些程序会忽略掉它们没有被规定寻找的东西 。 这时就需要公民科学了 。
Students, homemakers, artists, grandparentsall contribute to citizen science projects in myriad ways. There are projects thathelp look through camera trap pictures to identify animals. Projects where youand I can look at images of the Martian surface to identify wind patterns, atscanned manuscxts and digitise text, even create a database of wildlife. Thehuman brain is very good at recognising patterns – so much so that we even seepatterns where there might not be any.
学生、家庭主妇、艺术家、老爷爷老奶奶都能够以不计其数的方式对公民科学项目做出贡献 。 有的计划是帮助识别由隐蔽相机拍下来的动物 。 有些项目是让你我通过查看火星表面的照片来确认风型 , 有些是扫描手稿制作电子版文档 , 甚至还有建立野生动物数据的项目 。 人类大脑非常善于识别图案——以至于有时候我们甚至能看到本不存在的图案 。
Planet Hunters is a citizen science projectto help identify dips in the brightness of stars that computers could havemissed. As of August 2017, over 300,000 citizen scientists access it and combthrough Kepler data every day.
行星猎手就是这样一个公民科学项目 , 旨在帮助科学家识别被电脑遗漏的恒星亮度干扰 。 截止到2017年8月 , 已有超过30万公民科学工作者参与其中 , 每天都在梳理着开普勒太空望远镜传回的数据 。
In June 2009, astronomer Tabetha Boyajianwas alxed by a number of citizen scientists that a particular star about1,500 lightyears away was being consistently flagged by users as “interesting”and “bizarre.” Then a postdoc at the University of Yale, Boyajian and hercolleague Debra Fischer, who founded Planet Hunters, were hooked. The star theywere looking at did look like an anomaly. Its brightness initially dipped by atiny 0.5% – which was normal – but it lasted for four days, which is totallynot normal. Typically, planets that cross the path of stars like these tend tohave dips that last only a few hours.
在2009年6月 , 天文学家Tabetha Boyajian收到一群公民科学工作者的警报 , 称有一颗大概1500光年以外的独特恒星一直在被用户们贴上“有趣”或者“怪异”的标签 。 作为耶鲁大学的博士后 , Boyajian和她的同事Debra Fischer——行星猎手项目的发起人——被这个情况吸引住了 。 这颗恒星的确看起来十分不同 。 它的亮度一开始减弱了微小的0.5%——这很平常——但整整持续了四天 , 这就完全不平常了 。 一般来说 , 行星掠过类似恒星的表面形成的亮度干扰大概只会持续几个小时 。
That was the first dip in brightness theynoticed in the data, in early 2009. Following this, a few weeks later, thebrightness of KIC 8462852 dipped for almost a full week. Boyajian and Fischerspent days poring over the data and running through numbers, but the behaviourof KIC 8462852 couldn’t be explained away. The instruments were working fine,the computers were working fine, the data was clear. The dips were real – andinexplicable. And not only were there long periods of dimming, they were alsoweird kinds of dimming.


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