Bai Yang immediately informed his father about this major discovery.
His father remained composed, waving his hand dismissively. “What kind of major discovery is this? It’s no big deal – the image on the wall disappeared because the plaster was scraped off. Mark my words, something will happen in the future that’ll make them scrape off and repaint all the plaster in your room. Want to bet?”
“Don’t believe me? I’m putting it out there now. When it happens, come back and see.”
His father was acting like a prophet.
Bai Yang scratched his head. After discovering the disappearance of the wall image, his mind had conjured up tens of thousands of words worth of sci-fi movie plots – parallel universes, multiple histories, world-line jumping, with twisting plots that would move one’s soul. He was ready to channel Okabe Rintaro, prepared to cross multiple worlds to save Makise Kurisu and Mayuri’s “tuturu,” only to have his father see through everything with a single sentence.
Bai Yang turned his gaze toward Uncle Wang by the tea table.
Old Wang didn’t even lift his head, showing no interest in what Bai Yang said, focused only on signing his name to Little Zhu’s article.
Bai Yang could only turn back.
Lianqiao leaned against the doorframe, spreading her hands with a shrug.
Zhao Bowen was in a meeting.
Not at the provincial or municipal committee, but at the Purple Mountain Observatory.
He had been in a normal meeting earlier, reporting on the current work progress of the command center, when he suddenly received a message from the Purple Mountain Observatory. Quietly checking his phone, he saw there was a major discovery. So old Zhao, mid-sentence, threw down his notes, pushed back the table, dragged his chair, and sprinted away at full speed, leaving behind a group of leaders frozen like wooden chickens.
The leaders quietly asked their secretary if his house was on fire.
“Can it be any clearer?” Zhao Bowen frowned. A photo was being shown on the PPT, and a stack of photos was spread on the table in front of him.
“Uh… Teacher Zhao, you studied physics too, you understand…”
“I just want to know, can it be any clearer?” Zhao Bowen interrupted.
The photo had a black background with sparse white dots scattered across it, like chalk dust sprinkled on a blackboard. There was also a deep red arrow pointing to a dim spot in the center of the photo.
The label below reads Sgr A*.
Even Zhao Bowen, a complete layman in astronomy, knew that Sgr A* was Sagittarius A star. The speck in the photo was a supermassive black hole with a mass four million times that of the sun. Sitting in the conference room, one couldn’t tell at all. Zhao Bowen’s mind couldn’t even imagine how massive four million times the sun’s mass would be, but fortunately, the observatory director explained that it was a black hole, not a star, so despite having a mass of four million suns, its diameter was only forty million kilometers.
The photo in Zhao Bowen’s hand was an enlarged version of Sgr A*, with even lower clarity and in black and white. The dim white spot from the PPT was magnified hundreds of times in Zhao Bowen’s hand, blurrier than mashed black sesame, but the structure could still be roughly made out – it was a blurry, hazy ring without any details.
Old Zhao inexplicably thought of the large eye he saw that night. It was a similar pupil, and this association made Zhao Bowen shudder. Wasn’t the black hole’s property of not letting even light escape similar to that eye? When directly gazing at that giant eye, Zhao Bowen felt like he was looking into an abyss.
This photo was the fruit of the astronomy group’s labor over the past month and more.
Among all the expert groups, the astronomy group had taken on the most important yet blind task – analyzing and determining the possible origin 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 Earth. This was a crucial clue, and very reliable – as reliable as teachers telling you the entire textbook is within the exam scope.
With such a clue, the astronomy group also felt it was so reliable it made Reliable’s mother cry at Reliable’s funeral.
After rigorous reasoning, precise analysis, devout prayer, and random guessing (which is also an important part of scientific research), everyone unanimously agreed that the most valuable target was the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. So Earth’s long guns and short cannons turned their focus toward the galactic center – and hey, they found something.
They discovered that the fine shadow structure of Sagittarius A* was different from what they had expected, with possibly multiple gravitational sources interfering outside the accretion disk. Further X-ray band observations revealed that some energy was unaccounted for.
Although Purple Mountain Observatory repeatedly emphasized that this could completely be a natural phenomenon, given that the universe is vast and full of wonders, Zhao Bowen was already excitedly pounding the table: Black hole city! This is a black hole city! (Note 1) The Black Moon came from here!
“Is this the latest finding?”
Zhao Bowen calmed down.
“Old findings. Research on supermassive black holes has become a prominent field in astronomy. We’ve been working on this with colleagues in Europe and America, including UCLA and Max Planck Institute. Didn’t they release the world’s first black hole photo earlier this year? They created the EHT, called the Event Horizon Telescope, using VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) technology. They photographed the supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy in Virgo. That black hole is huge, 6.5 billion solar masses and their telescope has a virtual aperture equivalent to Earth’s diameter.”
“Can we requisition it?” This was Zhao Bowen’s first thought.
“Teacher Zhao, that’s foreign.” Someone reminded him in a lowered voice.
“Can we collaborate?” Zhao Bowen changed his wording.
“We’re already collaborating,” the presenter answered. “This observation plan has contacted EHT’s eight radio telescopes, but due to the short time and rushed planning, we can only achieve this level of results. After all, they prepared for ten years to photograph M87’s black hole.”
“We need to see more clearly.” Zhao Bowen knocked his knuckles on the wooden table.
“We can, but we’d need a longer baseline and longer observation time,” the presenter said. “The current results we’re seeing are the product of collaboration between Beijing’s LAMOST, Miyun, Shanghai Observatory, and several telescopes in Australia, North America, and South America. This kind of intercontinental cooperation already provides Earth’s maximum baseline. We can’t extend the baseline any further, only extend the observation time.”
“We don’t have ten years. In ten years, it’ll all be too late,” Zhao Bowen shook his head. “We can only make the telescope aperture larger.”
Zhao Bowen pushed his glasses up, once again displaying the excellent quality of a client: I don’t care how you do it, I just need you to get it done.
But if even an Earth-diameter aperture telescope wasn’t enough, how could they make an even larger aperture telescope?
“I roughly understand how VLBI works – multiple radio telescopes network together to form a virtual large-aperture telescope. If we can put the telescopes far enough apart, the virtual telescope’s aperture becomes larger,” Zhao Bowen said. “So let’s try this: why not utilize Earth’s revolution? Earth itself is rotating, and Earth’s motion can form a huge baseline. Ideally, the baseline could be as long as Earth’s orbital diameter, about two astronomical units.”
Zhao Bowen excitedly added:
“This would be approximately equivalent to a telescope with an aperture as large as Earth’s orbital path!”
“But VLBI requires simultaneity…”
Someone weakly reminded.
“There will certainly be challenges that need technical breakthroughs, I know everyone can solve these problems,” Zhao Bowen ignored the astronomy group’s protests and opened a second folder. “Good, now let’s move on to our second topic.”
Zhao Bowen looked down.
“How do we get the Voyager and Pioneer probes back? What are your thoughts? Speak freely. Those with proposals can move forward a bit.”
“Scraaaape—” With a harsh sound of chair legs scraping, everyone in the conference room uniformly took a step back.
(Note 1: Black hole city, proposed by famous physicist Roger Penrose in 1969, refers to a structure surrounding a black hole that can harness energy using the peculiar physical properties of the event horizon.)