I believe that everyone who has watched Avatar will be deeply impressed by the beautiful and romantic Pandora planet . So does such a planet really exist? Are there really signs of life on planets billions of light years away? Today, we invited a senior instructor in the field of astrophysics to join us to have an in-depth understanding of the “high-end” astrophysics in everyone’s impression !
Embark J Tutor

• PhD in Astrophysics from University of Science and Technology of China
• Published more than 50 research papers in the fields of extrasolar planets, supermassive black holes and galaxies.
• Guided more than ten high school students to participate in the Yau Prize and ISEF awards, and were admitted to top universities such as Cambridge University .

Instructor J has rich teaching experience in the field of astrophysics . How to train students interested in astrophysics? Is astrophysics suitable for students who are experiencing scientific research for the first time?Let’s take a look at Instructor J’s loving answer !The following is the first-person narration of instructor J

Exploration without boundaries can break through existing knowledge

A: Why did you choose physics in the first place?

J: There are many branches of physics, and I chose astrophysics because it has no boundaries and there are so many unknown things to explore . Current physics experienced a period of vigorous development at the beginning of the 20th century, innovating many people's cognitions, and then slowly fell into a bottleneck. Human beings have been unable to achieve breakthroughs in understanding nature again . Therefore, in other fields of physics now, you can actually see its boundaries. Currently, the most important thing for these fields is to explore things beyond the boundaries, and then use time and manpower to build some details.
strophysics is different . Take physical experiments as an example. Astrophysics is a physical experiment in ultra-extreme environments. It requires conditions that are not available in earth laboratories, such as extremely hot extreme conditions. Physics under such extreme conditions is beyond us. Physics in laboratories on Earth.
Nearly half of the Nobel Prizes in physics in recent years are related to astrophysics . This shows that if we want to achieve innovation in our understanding of nature again, the breakthrough point is astrophysics .

A: What is the more popular research direction in astrophysics?

J: The current research in astrophysics is nothing more than a few directions. The first thing that comes to my mind is related to planets. Whether it is exploring exoplanets or planets in the solar system, it is a direction worthy of attention. These are actually closely related to life . Life must live on planets, so when we explore planets, we are actually exploring the origin of life.

The first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (Source: EHT Collaboration)
The second is black holes. Black holes are quite interesting. They are the most familiar astrophysics topic and are very out of the ordinary, but they are also the things that everyone is least familiar with. Every time there is research on black holes, everyone is very interested. From a professional perspective, exploring black holes is also exploring new physics. Many people believe that new physics breakthroughs are contained in black holes .
Dark matter is also a hot topic. It makes up most of the universe, but we know very little about it. We live in the universe, but we don’t understand more than 90% of the things in the universe. This is the charm of astrophysics . When I design the topic, I basically focus on these aspects. Nowadays, cutting-edge astrophysics basically focuses on these aspects, but the research methods, specific objects, ideas and technologies will be different.

Break the stereotype! Is the threshold really higher for astrophysics?

A: You have a topic related to Avatar. What do you think is the difference or connection between the science fiction movies we watch every day and astrophysics in the field you actually study?

J: Take the classic Avatar and Interstellar as examples. Both movies actually have very serious scientific backgrounds . For example, the scientific guide for interstellar travel is actually one of the best general relativity experts in the world, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves. Therefore, the scenes and pictures shown in the movie have been strictly calculated and are not constructed by people's imagination. Of course, his storyline also has some theoretical support.

Avatar 1 classic scene
The same is true for Avatar. Director Cameron thought of this story at the time because astronomers found signs of a habitable planet at that time, but now according to the latest research, it does not exist. Therefore, I designed this topic to allow students to analyze the world of Avatar in this context through the data accumulated from the latest observations and combined with theory.
Of course, there will be some details that are not rigorous enough . This is what I want to discuss in this topic. I mainly want to seriously discuss with you what is right and what is wrong . For example, there is a planet in the movie where the tide is one kilometer high, but this data has not been calculated. If you perform strict calculations, you will find that if the tide was one kilometer high, this planet would not exist because it would be swallowed by the black hole.

A: If any of the students are having difficulty with the subject, how would you help them?

J: When I design topics, I mainly start from the perspective of students' interests. Students usually feel more confident when facing things they are familiar with. Then I remind them that familiar things actually contain profound scientific knowledge , and slowly guide them together. explore . If students encounter bottlenecks that are difficult to overcome, I will guide them appropriately and encourage them to explore various possibilities . I will not directly reveal the "answer" to them, because there is no so-called standard answer in scientific research. Independence in scientific research is very important . If scientific research is turned into exercises, it will be meaningless.

The most important thing is to guide students step by step . When I teach students, I will pay attention to their ability and mastery level. I will not take out everything at once. I will first let the students do some cutting-edge and easy-to-understand things slowly. If He felt relaxed, and we asked deeper and more difficult questions. When we explore deeper issues, students can also feel that research is a process of continuous development and will not be satisfied with the current results.
Scientific research is open-ended, and the same topic will have different depths. The level of the topic is related to one's own ability, the time of the project, etc. As long as the teacher and the teacher continue to move forward logically, the students will definitely gain something in the process. During the scientific research process, the students and I will continue to communicate to adjust the difficulty of the topic. Sometimes it is not just a matter of ability. For high school students doing scientific research, time is also a big issue. However, scientific research often requires the accumulation of time, so if you want to produce complete research, timely adjustments are necessary. Sometimes, if students' ability and time permit, the discussion can be continued with a deeper level of difficulty.

A:If a child is interested in astrophysics, how to guide the child's interest?

J：Encouraging students to join astronomy clubs for observation is a good way , which can provide them with real contact with the universe and an intuitive feeling for distant celestial bodies. If you have a telescope at home, you can try to observe those bright celestial objects . The changes of celestial objects contain a lot of knowledge. If you have the conditions to purchase a telephoto lens at home, you can also do celestial observation or photography. Such observation is actually the basis for many cutting-edge scientific research.

Another way, which is more accessible to the people, is to participate in some public astronomy projects . Because professional astronomical observation consumes a lot of manpower and time, so as I said before, there is now a lot of open science data in astronomy. Astronomers will put data, pictures, and some curves online, and then let the public observe and classify them . There are also many people who share interesting things so that more people can watch them together.
Current programs can only classify known things, but a lot of data in astrophysics is unknown. Without clear definitions, programs cannot handle such content. Many such projects have been labeled and classified through the power of the masses , and in the end they have achieved good results. Therefore, I highly recommend interested students to try this aspect. On the one hand, this is serious scientific research and is very close to cutting-edge science . On the other hand, it is more convenient and does not require too much time . You only need to go online to understand the data and the purpose of the project, and then complete a certain amount of work. You will have a part in the final scientific results. You will have a sense of participation and the process will be interesting at the same time.

What can middle school students bring to the table by doing scientific research?

A:What abilities do you think the scientific research experience in astrophysics has developed for students?

J: I remember a group of students. During the project, we discussed problems related to general relativity . At first, they may have felt that high school students had no way to solve such problems. But in fact, through their efforts, their cognitive level can reach this level , because we are not trying to explore and discover a new thing from scratch, but to discuss the concept proposed by our predecessors. When they overcame this obstacle, they felt that the problem was actually not that difficult, which also gave them more confidence to continue exploring, and the completion of the final project was also very high.
Based on this kind of scientific research experience, when applying and interviewing, I think they can better demonstrate the following characteristics and abilities:
logical thinking ability
The exercise in this area is the most intuitive . In scientific research projects, you need to constantly exercise your logic to think about problems and discover new problems.
internal drive
I think this is a very important trait, more important than interest, because interest often does not support people's long-term persistence. Scientific research can come from interest, but if you don’t have the inner drive for scientific research, it will be difficult to complete a complete project. Moreover, internal drive can drive students to continuously explore a problem in depth , rather than stopping at a conclusion and feeling that they have completed it. Therefore, internal drive is very important for scientific research.
decision making/judgment
This is an ability honed through many failures in scientific research projects. When your scientific research experience reaches a certain level, your judgment on many scientific research issues will become more accurate . For example, the prospects of some scientific research directions, you can more quickly judge whether a research direction has a future. The same goes for research methods. When students first face a problem, they will always find there are many research methods, but after many trials and errors, they will always conclude the path that is most suitable for this topic and for themselves.

A: What do you think of middle school students doing scientific research?

J: I very much agree with middle school students doing scientific research. I think scientific research is now the same thing as music, art, and sports. If you have the conditions, you might as well make an in-depth attempt and maybe you can tap your own potential. Many times potential is different from interest . Some children are interested but may not have the potential. Some children have potential but have not tried it so they don’t know. If your financial ability allows, try more fields and expand your horizons to discover your potential.

On the other hand, exposure to scientific research for middle school students can also allow them to better plan their lives . Some students say they are very interested in this research now, but they may not choose to develop in this direction after they really go deep into this industry to do scientific research . It’s good to try out a few options before choosing a major in college. Understanding the processes of various disciplines, whether it is humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, or engineering technology, is also of great benefit to improving one's own literacy. Therefore, I feel that in addition to allowing you to better explore the world, scientific research is also a process of exploring and understanding yourself .
For me, the process of doing scientific research with students is very interesting, and I have become more and more aware that it is important to train children to do scientific research in modern society. It is difficult for today's students to distinguish between true and false in the flood of information, and they become the party where knowledge is input, so they lack the ideas to explore on their own. I think scientific research is very suitable for cultivating students' ability to explore original knowledge. The attitude towards knowledge is very important. We should trace the knowledge to its most primitive place. We would rather not know that much, but what we want to know must be understood by our own ability. It only makes sense to understand things vertically from the most primitive place to the present .
As mentioned earlier, Tutor J has rich teaching experience . Under his guidance, many students have been admitted to dream schools because of their astrophysics research experience and their outstanding performance! Scientific research experience can cultivate many characteristics of students, and Top American universities often value these characteristics of students .
If you are interested in Tutor J’s scientific research topics, you can leave the contact information on the right to learn more about Tutor J’s topics and research directions!