科学美国人60秒 银河系的历史成为焦点

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The History of the Milky¹ Way Comes Into Focus

银河系的历史成为焦点

Christopher Intagliata: When you look up at the Milky Way, you're gazing at the galactic equivalent of Rome. A metropolis² of stars, with layers upon layers of history—just like The Eternal City. So says the astronomer³ Hans-Walter Rix.

Christopher Intagliata：当你仰望银河系时，你正在凝视罗马的银河系。 星辰大都会，层层叠叠的历史——就像永恒之城。 天文学家汉斯-沃尔特·里克斯如是说。

Hans-Walter Rix: There were glory days, there were disasters, and all of these things kind of happen in the life of galaxies⁴. And the Milky Way is just the one galaxy⁵ where we can look at star by star so you can kind of see individual episodes in actual detail.

Hans-Walter Rix：有过辉煌的日子，也有过灾难，所有这些事情都发生在星系的生活中。 银河系只是我们可以逐星观察的一个星系，因此您可以查看各个情节的实际细节。

Intagliata: Now Rix and a colleague at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany have indeed gone star by star… determining the ages of nearly a quarter million stars in the Milky Way. That work has allowed them to reconstruct some of the major life events in the galaxy's evolution, over its 13 billion years of existence.

Intagliata：现在，Rix 和德国马克斯-普朗克天文学研究所的一位同事确实逐星进行了研究……确定了银河系中近 25 万颗恒星的年龄。 这项工作使他们能够重建银河系演化中的一些主要生命事件，在其存在的 130 亿年中。

Rix: What it showed is that indeed the youth and childhood of the Milky Way was turbulent… but actually afterwards we've lived an enormously sheltered life compared to most other galaxies. Gas drizzled⁶ in, and the suburbs grew peacefully and sprawled⁷.

Rix：它表明银河系的青年和童年确实是动荡的……但实际上，与大多数其他星系相比，我们过着非常隐蔽的生活。 煤气下着毛毛细雨，郊区平静地蔓延开来。

Intagliata: The astronomers⁸ say that the galaxy's thick disk began to form about 13 billion years ago, just 800 million years after the Big Bang. Then, around 11 billion years ago, a cataclysmic collision occurred: the Gaia-Enceladus satellite galaxy crashed into the Milky Way.

Intagliata：天文学家说，银河系的厚圆盘大约在 130 亿年前开始形成，也就是大爆炸之后的 8 亿年。 然后，大约 110 亿年前，发生了一场灾难性的碰撞：盖亚-土卫二卫星星系坠入了银河系。

Rix: And just at the same time, there was a huge burst of star formation, or a large increase of star formation in our own Milky Way. And that suggests—doesn't prove—that the perturbance that this in-falling satellite created, caused a lot of gas that was in our Milky Way to form stars.

Rix：就在同一时间，恒星形成的巨大爆发，或者说我们银河系中的恒星形成大幅增加。 这表明——并不能证明——这颗坠落的卫星产生的扰动导致我们银河系中的大量气体形成了恒星。

Intagliata: The details are in the journal Nature. [Maosheng Xiang & Hans-Walter Rix, A time-resolved picture of our Milky Way’s early formation history]

Intagliata：详情见自然杂志

Now, none of this is a total surprise—people have simulated the Milky Way's formation before.

Rix: So I would say really what our work has done is it just shows it clearly a long-suspected picture is coming into focus.

现在，这一切都不足为奇——人们以前曾模拟过银河系的形成。

Rix：所以我想说的是，我们的工作所做的只是清楚地表明，一幅长期怀疑的画面正在成为焦点。

Intagliata: In other words—this work lays out a more definitive⁹ playbill of the acts in this galactic drama.

Intagliata：换句话说，这部作品为这部银河剧中的行为制定了更明确的剧本。

1 milky   

adj.牛奶的，多奶的；乳白色的

参考例句：

• Alexander always has milky coffee at lunchtime.亚历山大总是在午餐时喝掺奶的咖啡。
• I like a hot milky drink at bedtime.我喜欢睡前喝杯热奶饮料。

2 metropolis   

n.首府；大城市

参考例句：

• Shanghai is a metropolis in China.上海是中国的大都市。
• He was dazzled by the gaiety and splendour of the metropolis.大都市的花花世界使他感到眼花缭乱。

3 astronomer   

n.天文学家

参考例句：

• A new star attracted the notice of the astronomer.新发现的一颗星引起了那位天文学家的注意。
• He is reputed to have been a good astronomer.他以一个优秀的天文学者闻名于世。

4 galaxies   

星系( galaxy的名词复数 )； 银河系； 一群（杰出或著名的人物）

参考例句：

• Quasars are the highly energetic cores of distant galaxies. 类星体是遥远星系的极为活跃的核心体。
• We still don't know how many galaxies there are in the universe. 我们还不知道宇宙中有多少个星系。

5 galaxy   

n.星系；银河系；一群(杰出或著名的人物)

参考例句：

• The earth is one of the planets in the Galaxy.地球是银河系中的星球之一。
• The company has a galaxy of talent.该公司拥有一批优秀的人才。

6 drizzled   

下蒙蒙细雨，下毛毛雨( drizzle的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The dew on the branches drizzled our hair and shoulders. 枝头上的露珠润湿了我们的头发和双肩。
• It drizzled throughout the night. 毛毛雨下了一夜。

7 sprawled   

v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的过去式和过去分词)；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着）

参考例句：

• He was sprawled full-length across the bed. 他手脚摊开横躺在床上。
• He was lying sprawled in an armchair, watching TV. 他四肢伸开正懒散地靠在扶手椅上看电视。

8 astronomers   

n.天文学者，天文学家( astronomer的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Astronomers can accurately foretell the date,time,and length of future eclipses. 天文学家能精确地预告未来日食月食的日期、时刻和时长。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Astronomers used to ask why only Saturn has rings. 天文学家们过去一直感到奇怪，为什么只有土星有光环。 来自《简明英汉词典》

9 definitive   

adj.确切的，权威性的；最后的，决定性的

参考例句：

• This book is the definitive guide to world cuisine.这本书是世界美食的权威指南。
• No one has come up with a definitive answer as to why this should be so.至于为什么该这样，还没有人给出明确的答复。