Holiday photos test galaxy theories
Your family photos could be turned into random numbers to test theories on the formation of galaxies and mathematical models, say Australian researchers.
The researchers have developed a novel way of making random numbers using images of space. But they say you can use any images.
The research by Dr Michael Bulmer and Dr Kevin Pimbblet from the University of Queensland has been accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
Random numbers are generally generated using computers and they are used mainly in simulations. In physics random numbers are used to simulate galaxy formations and in statistics to refine mathematical models.
But anything created on a computer is at risk from people trying to decipher the code used to generate the random numbers, Bulmer said.
Instead the researchers make random numbers using random noise from cosmic rays in images of space. The noise, which speckles space images, is usually something astronomers try to get rid of. But instead of becoming waste, Bulmer said the noise can be recycled.
He said while using images to generate random numbers was slow, the researchers were more interested in where the randomness comes from, and what makes a suitable image for this process.
Bulmer said there were two main sources of random noise in images of space. One source was cosmic rays that hit the special piece of silicon used instead of film in a CCD, or charge-coupled device camera.
The silicon, or CCD, consists of tens of thousands of tiny pixels. Cosmic rays can cause hot spots unrelated to stars on the pixels of the CCD. The CCD itself can also form hot-spots when a pixel on the chip reacts to the light coming in.
How to make a random number
You can transform your own images into random numbers at the researchers' website.
The images generate binary random numbers, consisting of a series of ones and zeros. The program first subjects an image to a number of transformations. A colour image is made into a greyscale image, and undergoes a transformation where each pixel is blurred.
The one-pixel blur removes tiny fluctuations in the image, but doesn't affect anything bigger than one pixel in diameter, such as a star.
The removed information is transformed into a black and white image. This then becomes a text file, with white and black represented by one and zero.
"Because it's looking at the night sky the main result is zero because the image is mostly black," said Bulmer. So the researchers 'de-skew' the distribution of zeros and ones to give an equal chance of the next number being either a one or a zero.
"We want it to be like flipping a coin, whether you get heads or tails is equally likely," Bulmer said.
"We also want the numbers to be independent, so if you have one pixel that's light over here, is not somehow related to another pixel over there."
The researchers are looking to connect their work with the CONintuous CAMera (CONCAM) sky monitoring project, a group of telescopes throughout the world that provides a continuous display of the night-time sky.
They said this would give them a permanent source of images from which to generate random numbers.