【Sunburn our country heavy equipment 19】
In a sun-synchronous orbit about 500 kilometers above the ground, "Wukong" from China is traveling.
Every day, this small 1-meter-square satellite orbits the ground about 15 times, using the "golden eye of fire" to try to detect the traces of high-energy particles in the universe.
What is this "Sun Monkey" looking for?
In fact, in the vast Milky Way, in addition to stars, planets and other celestial bodies that are visible to our naked eyes, there may also be many invisible dark matter. Scientists speculate that they do not emit light and basically do not interact with other substances, and under general optical observation, they are like "invisibility".
However, when a pair of dark matter particles collide by chance, they may annihilate and emit high-energy particles such as electrons, positrons and gamma rays. If the information of these particles can be accurately "captured", it may be possible to deduce clues to the existence of dark matter.
On September 7, 2021, the first batch of gamma photonic scientific data of the "Wukong" dark matter particle detection satellite was released to the world. Since the successful flying sky on December 17, 2015, the valuable data released by "Wukong" has attracted the world's attention again and again, and has promoted the further understanding of the universe by mankind.
What does this "Sun Monkey" look like?
The satellite, developed and produced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is not much larger than a desk, like an inverted silver-white four-layer cake, but the payload reaches 1.4 tons, and nearly 80,000 electronic channels are integrated inside. From top to bottom, Wukong is equipped with four major detectors: plastic flash array detector, silicon array trail detector, BGO (bismuth germanate) energy detector and neutron detector. Among them, the BGO energy meter contains more than 300 60 cm long bismuth germanate crystals. These beautiful "crystal rods" are like Sun Wukong's "golden hoop sticks", which can make extremely sensitive measurements of the energy of incident particles.
How strong does its eyesight have to be to be called "golden eyes of fire"?
According to Chang Jin, chief scientist of Wukong and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wukong is the space cosmic ray detector with the widest range of observation energy segments and the best energy resolution in the world so far, and the first space astronomical satellite on the mainland. It can "capture" an average of 60 high-energy particles per second, and can measure cosmic ray particles such as electrons and gamma rays between GeV and tens of TEv orders.
What is this concept? 1 GeV is 1 billion electron volts, and 1 TeV is 1000 GeV, or 1 trillion electron volts. The most sensitive visible light energy that the human eye can receive is only about 2 electron volts.
In more than 6 years of flight, Wukong has completed more than 11 full-day zone scans and obtained tens of billions of high-energy cosmic ray events. Every morning and evening, this "Sun Monkey" would fly over China. Receiving stations in Miyun, Beijing, Kashgar, Xinjiang, and Sanya, Hainan, receive data from The Wukong every day, and through this data, the veil of dark matter has been lifted one after another...
In May 2021, the Wukong team mapped the most accurate high-energy helium-nucleus cosmic ray spectra to date and observed a new structure of the energy spectrum. This is the third time that "Wukong" has released important scientific results after accurately measuring the electron energy spectrum and drawing the high-energy proton cosmic ray energy spectrum, marking that the detection of high-energy particles in continental space has ranked among the forefront of the world!
The international physics community generally believes that unveiling the mystery of dark matter will be another basic scientific change after the heliocentric theory, the law of gravitation, relativity and quantum mechanics.
Stepping into the forefront of the dark matter detection competition, Chinese scientists believe that with the help of the vast magic powers of "Wukong" and "Fire Eye Golden Eye", we will be able to glimpse a new cosmic outlook, and it may not be far from catching the "invisible and untouchable" dark matter!
Source: Guangming Network