What astronomical unit is μas?

1μas is equal to 1 microsecond. A second (English: Attosecond), with symbol as, is an international time unit, which is 10- 18 seconds, that is,11000 femtoseconds. In proportion, an attosecond is less than a second, just like a second is 3 17 1 billion years, which is about twice the age of the universe. Time units are getting smaller and smaller. In fact, it has become very small now: four years ago, physicists successfully produced a laser pulse, although it only lasted for femtoseconds (1 femtosecond is equivalent to 10ˊ 15 seconds).

In daily photography, the flash of the camera can "freeze" the time within11000 seconds-this speed is enough to capture the fast swing of the baseball batter, except, of course, the fastball that exceeds the speed. Similarly, femtosecond "flash" can also take advantage of phenomena that some scientists have never seen in the microscopic world: ultra-small and ultra-fast things such as oscillating molecules and chemical bonds formed by atoms in chemical reactions.

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Ultra-fast things are hard to grasp. All kinds of ultra-fast things can happen in one or two femtoseconds. If your flash is too slow, you will miss these fleeting shots. Therefore, scientists are trying to develop a more subtle and accurate "time window" and use it to observe the material world. An international research team composed of some well-known physicists finally succeeded in breaking through the so-called "femtosecond barrier".

They used a complex high-energy laser generator to generate optical pulses with a duration of more than 0.5 femtoseconds, or 650 attosecond to be exact. For a long time, "A second" existed as a theoretical time scale, and this time everyone really felt it.

The discoverer is a physicist from Stisi, and Paul Kauku, one of the main investigators of this study, commented: "This is the real-time scale of matter. We are learning to use the characteristics of atoms and molecules themselves to observe the microscopic world composed of them. "

Although this scientific research achievement is rarely appreciated, in fact, our human physiological functions coexist-and depend on several different time scales. For example, the heart of ordinary people beats once every second: the speed of light is1100 second; A home computer can run a simple software instruction in 1 nanosecond; The circuit switches several times in 1 picosecond. Time units are getting smaller and smaller, and it is more and more difficult for people to keep up.