

Ask HN: What is Hyperion "3-d dust continuum radiative transfer code"? - X4

Here&#x27;s the project: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hyperion-rt.org&#x2F;<p>I really want to understand what it is, but honestly it happens rarely that I understand nothing, I mean like really nothing.. this stuff raised my interest!<p>Can someone knowing physics please explain it?
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anigbrowl
It models light (and other radiation) interaction with dust clouds for
astronomy modeling. Think of a pool table with some balls on it, then shine a
laser on one of the balls and move it about a bit. You would expect
reflections and if you moved the laser around enough you would eventually be
able to figure out the positions of the balls from observing the reflections.
Now imagine it in 3 dimensions instead of 2, with tiny specks of dust instead
of large smooth sphere - like the dust clouds that drift through space,
affected by light and other sorts of radiation from stars. This provides a
means of simulating those clouds and the results of such simulations are
useful to compare with observations from telescopes and satellites and help
astronomers to guess what they are looking at.

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X4
WOW, thanks so much for explaining it!!

After reading the pdf from @27182818284 (the first letters of 'e') until
chapter 2 I still didn't get anything. But now I have the feel that I
understand it much better.

Could one improve this technique by adding more laser beams, to triangulate
the location of the 'point cloud' (that's the dust, right?) more precisely.

I think this could (maybe?, then) be even used to find out from which subpost
a post originated.

    
    
         words  → dust
         laser  → ontology+semantic
         3D     → different semantic contexts/time
    

I am not sure if that would work, but I am thankful to having learned
something completely new.

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27182818284
The introduction here might give you an idea:

[http://www-star.st-and.ac.uk/~kw25/research/montecarlo/book....](http://www-
star.st-and.ac.uk/~kw25/research/montecarlo/book.pdf)

