英语听力文摘 English Digest 688 宇宙的颜色（在线收听）

The Color Of The Universe

When we look up into the night sky it seems black, but scientists have observed something different. In this Moment of Science we discuss the color of the universe.

Colors

Recently, scientists have concluded that the color of the universe is beige. That’s right, scientists from Johns Hopkins gathered detailed data measuring light from over two hundred thousand galaxies, some of which are up to several billion light years away from earth. They processed this data and broke the light down into different optical wavelengths– much like how a prism breaks white light into various colors.

The scientists used a computer program to analyze the results obtained with a modern prism. Then they replaced each wavelength with the color the human eye sees at that wavelength to construct what they called a “cosmic spectrum” to represent all that energy. Finally, they varied the intensity of each color on the spectrum in proportion to that wavelength’s intensity in the universe.

So, It’s Beige?

And after all that, they concluded that the average wavelength is most similar to a nondescript beige. However, researchers initially did think the color of the universe was closer to a turquoise, but then it turned out that the computer program they were using calculated the colors incorrectly.

宇宙的颜色

当我们仰望夜空时，天空似乎是黑色的，但科学家们观察到了一些不同的东西。在这个科学时刻，我们讨论宇宙的颜色。

颜色

最近，科学家得出结论，宇宙的颜色是米色。没错，约翰斯·霍普金斯大学的科学家收集了详细的数据，测量了来自二十多万个星系的光线，其中一些星系距离地球高达数十亿光年。他们处理了这些数据，并将光分解成不同的光学波长，就像棱镜将白光分解成不同颜色一样。

科学家们使用计算机程序分析用现代棱镜获得的结果。然后，他们用人眼在该波长上看到的颜色替换每个波长，以构建他们所称的“宇宙光谱”来表示所有能量。最后，他们改变了光谱中每种颜色的强度，使其与宇宙中该波长的强度成比例。

所以，它是米色的？

毕竟，他们得出的结论是，平均波长最类似于不伦不类的米色。然而，研究人员最初确实认为宇宙的颜色更接近绿松石，但后来发现，他们使用的计算机程序计算出了错误的颜色。