Black holes

黑洞

Staring into the abyss

凝視深淵

Astronomers take the ?rst snap of a black hole

宇航員拍下了第一張黑洞快照

What black holes do to the things around them is hard to miss. Matter hurtling into them at almost the speed of light gives o? all sorts of radiation, sometimes so much of it that it can be seen half a cosmos away. The black holes themselves, though, are another matter. They are, by cosmic standards, extremely small. And they are de?ned by having gravitational ?elds so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. That is why it is remarkable that an international team of more than 200 radio astronomers have, through years of painstaking work, actually contrived a glimpse of one.

在黑洞周?chē)奈镔|(zhì)都是很難逃脫的。以近乎光速射入黑洞的物質(zhì)會(huì)釋放出各種各樣的輻射，有時(shí)輻射強(qiáng)度大到可以在半個(gè)宇宙之外看到。然而，黑洞本身則是另一種物質(zhì)。他們以宇宙的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)來(lái)看，相當(dāng)渺小。而且它們被定義有著強(qiáng)大的引力場(chǎng)，以至于任何東西，甚至光，都無(wú)法逃離它們。這就是為什么一個(gè)由200多名射電天文學(xué)家組成的國(guó)際團(tuán)隊(duì)，經(jīng)過(guò)多年艱苦的工作，僅僅是瞥到一眼黑洞，也是一件具有里程碑意義的事。

詞匯

Hurtling\ ?急飛，猛烈碰撞，猛擲

Cosmos ?\宇宙；和諧；秩序；

gravitational ?elds\引力場(chǎng)

painstaking\艱苦的；勤勉的；小心的

contrived\人為的；做作的；不自然的

The black hole in question (pictured below) is located at the centre of a galaxy 55m light-years from Earth called Messier 87, one of the largest and most luminous galaxies in the nearby universe. Astronomers have for some time suspected that it houses a phenomenally massive black hole—one 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun, and more than a thousand times more massive than the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy in which the Earth and Sun sit.

我們猜想中的這個(gè)黑洞（下方圖片中的黑洞）位于距離地球5500萬(wàn)光年的 Messier 87星系的中心，Messier 87是附近宇宙中最大、最明亮的星系之一。一直以來(lái)，天文學(xué)家們一直懷疑它有一個(gè)異常巨大的黑洞——一個(gè)比太陽(yáng)大65億倍的黑洞，比地球和太陽(yáng)所在的銀河系中心的黑洞大1000多倍。

詞匯

Luminous\發(fā)光的；明亮的；清楚的??????????????

Phenomenally\現(xiàn)象上地；明白地；從感官認(rèn)識(shí)到

But massive does not mean large. The edge of a black hole is called an event horizon, because nothing that happens beyond it can ever be seen under any circumstances. The black hole in Messier 87 has an event about half a light-day across (about the size of the bit of the Solar System that has planets in it). This means that, seen from the Earth, it looks no larger than a coin on the surface of the Moon.

但是“大”并不意味著大。黑洞的邊緣被稱(chēng)為視界，因?yàn)樵谒獍l(fā)生的任何事情在任何情況下都看不見(jiàn)。 Messier 87號(hào)的黑洞直徑約為半光天(大約是太陽(yáng)系中有行星的那部分的大小)。這意味著，從地球上看，它并不比月球表面的一枚硬幣大。

?

The smaller the thing you are observing appears in the sky, the larger the aperture of the telescope you need to look for it. The Event Horizon Telescope (eht) team put together one with an aperture the size of Earth by bringing together data from radio telescopes all around the world. Adding together the signals received by these various telescopes allowed them to synthesise an image as good as the one they would have got from single telescopes as large as the distance between any two of the dishes, though a great deal dimmer. This sort of “extremely long baseline interferometry” has been used for decades—but never before with this amount of data.

你所觀察到的物體在天空中出現(xiàn)的越小，你需要尋找它的望遠(yuǎn)鏡的孔徑就越大。視界望遠(yuǎn)鏡(eht)團(tuán)隊(duì)通過(guò)收集來(lái)自世界各地射電望遠(yuǎn)鏡的數(shù)據(jù)，制作出了一個(gè)與地球大小相仿的光圈。把這些不同望遠(yuǎn)鏡接收到的信號(hào)加在一起，他們就能合成出一幅和他們從單個(gè)望遠(yuǎn)鏡得到的圖像一樣好的圖像，而單臺(tái)望遠(yuǎn)鏡的距離與任何兩個(gè)碟形望遠(yuǎn)鏡之間的距離一樣大，只是亮度要低得多。這種“超長(zhǎng)基線干涉測(cè)量法”已經(jīng)使用了幾十年，但從來(lái)沒(méi)有使用過(guò)這么多的數(shù)據(jù)。

詞匯

Aperture/孔，穴；（照相機(jī)，望遠(yuǎn)鏡等的）光圈，孔徑；縫隙

?

In total, eight observatories on four continents were used to hunt for the black hole in Messier 87, including two, in Antarctica and Chile, that enjoy particularly dry skies. Because the observations needed to be precisely synchronised, each instrument was tethered to its own atomic clock.

總共有四個(gè)大洲的八個(gè)天文臺(tái)被用來(lái)尋找 Messier 87號(hào)的黑洞，其中兩個(gè)位于南極洲和智利，有著極為干燥的天空的優(yōu)勢(shì)。由于觀測(cè)需要精確同步，每臺(tái)儀器都與自己的原子鐘拴著。

詞匯

Synchronized/ ?同步的

Tethered/用繩或鏈拴住