SSS 2012-06-04
时间：2019-01-08 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(六)月
英语课
This is Scientific Americans 60 second science, I am John Matson.
We’re just hours away from the last transit 1 of Venus until the year 2117. A transit is when a planet passes in front of the sun, revealing itself as a tiny black dot on the sun’s face. Transits 2 in the 18th century helped us figure out the dimensions of the solar system, which are now well known. But the 2012 transit will still provide information that could help astronomers 3 understand distant exoplanets.
“During a transit you get a tiny bit of light that passes through the planet’s atmosphere, if it has an atmosphere. And so, if you tease that out you then can start doing all kinds of interesting science on the atmosphere itself.”
Mark Anderson, author of The Day The World Discovered The Sun, about the 18th-century Venus transits.
“So there are going to be telescopes all over the world, and what they’re all going to be looking for is the about 0.001 percent of the sun’s light that has also passed through the atmosphere of Venus during the transit. That’s interesting to astronomers—they can work backwards 4 from that light and figure out, well, what is the chemistry in Venus’s atmosphere.
“So what the Venus transit allows us to do is to study a known system, where we know Venus, we understand its atmosphere relatively 5 well, we understand the sun’s light relatively well. The one thing we don’t have a good picture of is what does it look like when Venus transits directly in front of the sun and we study that light very carefully. Then you can take the things that we learn from studying the transit of Venus and apply it to a transit of another planet elsewhere in the galaxy 6 and maybe even someday study its atmosphere.
“So that’s why the Venus transit is really helpful, because it lets us do kind of a test case where we understand all the parameters 7, and then we apply all that knowledge to studying these planets elsewhere in the galaxy.”
n.经过，运输；vt.穿越，旋转；vi.越过
- His luggage was lost in transit.他的行李在运送中丢失。
- The canal can transit a total of 50 ships daily.这条运河每天能通过50条船。
通过（transit的复数形式）
- The anomalistic year is the time between successive transits of the Earth through the perihelion. 近点年是地球连续两次通过近日点之间的时间。
- Paradigm study gradually transits to exemplification study in civil society theory. 当前我国的市民社会理论正逐步从范式研究转向范例研究。
n.天文学者，天文学家( astronomer的名词复数 )
- 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》
adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地
- He turned on the light and began to pace backwards and forwards.他打开电灯并开始走来走去。
- All the girls fell over backwards to get the party ready.姑娘们迫不及待地为聚会做准备。
adv.比较...地，相对地
- The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
- The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。
n.星系；银河系；一群(杰出或著名的人物)
- 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。
因素，特征； 界限； （限定性的）因素( parameter的名词复数 )； 参量； 参项； 决定因素
- We have to work within the parameters of time. 我们的工作受时间所限。
- See parameters.cpp for a compilable example. This is part of the Spirit distribution. 可编译例子见parameters.cpp.这是Spirit分发包的组成部分。