英语听力：自然百科 行星旅行指南：木星 Jupiter—9

 This could be the most terrifying sight in the solar system: clear skies above a bottomless pit, an infernal drop into the depth of Jupiter’s endless sky.

 

You may have raindrops evaporating into the hot interiors of Jupiter, but there is no ocean down there. There is nothing now but just hot, more hot atmosphere.

 

Transmission was lost about 100 miles below the cloud tops.

 

Just hours after we lost contact with the probe, it descended¹ into the part of the atmosphere where the probe material itself would have a sort of evaporating, so in sort of an examined closure, our atmospheric² probe became part of the atmosphere for the studying.

 

Heroic as the descent was, the probe penetrated³ only the outermost⁴ onionskin of Jupiter, peeled back the layers that Galileo couldn't reach, and the mysteries / deepened.

 

We must now travel to the very strange heart of Jupiter to answer a true cosmic puzzle. How a gas giant is born? There is no boundary to run into, no concrete surface. But far below the clouds, the pressure squeezes hydrogen from a hot gas atmosphere into a hot liquid ocean. It’s deep. Keep going down another 12,000 miles and the liquid transforms again into something even stranger.

 

Temperatures and pressures would get to the point where protons lose track of / electrons and nuclei⁵ lose track of the electrons. And you basically just have a kind of a yummy, yummy soup, which is very hard to imagine. It’s just like trying to imagine yourself being inside of a star basically. Hydrogen, for instance, goes into what we call a metallic⁶ state. It’s the electrically conducting ‘food’ that’s causing Jupiter’s immensely powerful magnetic field.

 

1 descended   

a.为...后裔的，出身于...的

参考例句：

• A mood of melancholy descended on us. 一种悲伤的情绪袭上我们的心头。
• The path descended the hill in a series of zigzags. 小路呈连续的之字形顺着山坡蜿蜒而下。

2 atmospheric   

adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的

参考例句：

• Sea surface temperatures and atmospheric circulation are strongly coupled.海洋表面温度与大气环流是密切相关的。
• Clouds return radiant energy to the surface primarily via the atmospheric window.云主要通过大气窗区向地表辐射能量。

3 penetrated   

adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式

参考例句：

• The knife had penetrated his chest. 刀子刺入了他的胸膛。
• They penetrated into territory where no man had ever gone before. 他们已进入先前没人去过的地区。

4 outermost   

adj.最外面的，远离中心的

参考例句：

• He fired and hit the outermost ring of the target.他开枪射中了靶子的最外一环。
• The outermost electron is shielded from the nucleus.原子核对最外层电子的作用受到屏蔽。

5 nuclei   

n.核

参考例句：

• To free electrons, something has to make them whirl fast enough to break away from their nuclei. 为了释放电子，必须使电子高速旋转而足以摆脱原子核的束缚。
• Energy is released by the fission of atomic nuclei. 能量是由原子核分裂释放出来的。

6 metallic   

adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的

参考例句：

• A sharp metallic note coming from the outside frightened me.外面传来尖锐铿锵的声音吓了我一跳。
• He picked up a metallic ring last night.昨夜他捡了一个金属戒指。