VOA常速英语:新型强力望远镜将普通天文学家和专业人士联系起来

Unless you’re an astronomer, the moment when the star in the center of this image flickers may not seem so exciting.
But it marks the passage of an asteroid,space objects which are usually too small and faint to see.
Those asteroids sometimes pass very close to us.
They are detected a few hours, a few days before the flyby.
And if we dont follow them up while theyre doing the flyby,we will basically lose them.
In this case, the critical data came from a new consumer telescope carried in a backpack to a desert in Oman.

Frank Martius whose day job at SETI Institute involves working with the worlds largest telescopes,
designed the Evie scope with colleagues at Unistellar to inspire a movement of citizen scientists.
The goal of the company is to democratize astronomy,I think we are ready for that.
Advances in technology give the Evie scope the power of a room sized telescope while making it much easier to use.
If you choose a point of interest with the app,the Evie scope locates it using a star database as a map.
A low light sensor enhances faint stars by combining multiple exposures.
Users can also upload what they’re seeing for researchers to analyze.
So we’d be able to send notification to our users when there is something interesting to observe in the sky, a new comet, a new supernova.
We are going to be able to put together all those observations and get the best picture.
An algorithm will search for the unexpected, like asteroids heading our way.
Or it could be something even more exotic,like the birth of a civilization trying to communicate with us.
Citizen scientists can have a key role in this new era of space discovery