英语听力：自然百科 穿越银河系的旅行 Through Milky Way—30（在线收听） |
We've transported the earth 3 billion years into the future. The sky is dominated by a massive galaxy called Andromeda. The view looks peaceful enough. But what’s about to happen is one of the greatest calamities in the universe. The clues lie in these mysterious Hubble images. They show a type of galaxy unlike any other. They appear distorted, deformed. To understand what these mysterious objects represent, astronomers have turned to computers. What we do is we make / galaxies that look just like the Milky Way and similar galaxies. And we let them evolve in the computer, they develop this spiral structure, they look quite realistic. We then put them on a collision path.
Freeze-frame these simulations and match them with real images and suddenly the picture becomes clear. We are looking at the greatest clashes in the cosmos, galaxies in collision.
Like cities, galaxies tend to cluster. Our Milky Way belongs to one called the local group, made of at least 50 galaxies. The largest in the pack is Andromeda, a spiral galaxy even bigger than ours. Today Andromeda lies 2.5 billion light years away, but astronomers like Abraham Loeb know that distance is closing.
When I started working in astrophysics, I noticed that most of my colleagues are thinking about other galaxies interacting with each other, colliding with each other, and I was wondering why aren't they examining the future of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy as they will come together.
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| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/zrbaike/2011/260185.html |