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Supernovae are significant to us in one other decidedly central way. Without them we wouldn't be here. You will recall the cosmological conundrum with which we ended the first chapterthat the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements

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The question that naturally occurs is What would it be like if a star exploded nearby? Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 year

万物简史 第47期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(11)

There's something satisfying, I think, Evans said, about the idea of light traveling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an e

万物简史 第46期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(10)

Looking for supernovae is mostly a matter of not finding them. From 1980 to 1996 he averaged two discoveries a yearnot a huge payoff for hundreds of nights of peering and peering. Once he found three in fifteen days, but another time he went three ye

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For all his achievements, however, Halley's greatest contribution to human knowledge may simply have been to take part in a modest scientific wager with two other worthies of his day: Robert Hooke, who is perhaps best remembered now as the first pers

万物简史 第31期:走进太阳系(9)

So the solar system is really quite enormous. By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sunour dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sunhas shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star. 所以，太阳系确实是

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So that's your solar system. And what else is out there, beyond the solar system? Well, nothing and a great deal, depending on how you look at it. 这就是你所在的太阳系。太阳系之外还有别的什么？哎呀，也许什么也没有，也

万物简史 第36期:走进太阳系(14)

What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, w

万物简史 第44期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(8)

Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can

万物简史 第43期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(7)

Interestingly, Zwicky had almost no understanding of why any of this would happen. According to Thorne, he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able to substantiate his ideas. Zwicky's talent was for big ideas. OthersBaade mostlyw

万物简史 第37期:埃文斯牧师的宇宙(1)

3 THE REVEREND EVANS'S UNIVERSE 3.埃文斯牧师的宇宙 When the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Au

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Now the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in itthe Sun, the planets and their m

万物简史 第29期:走进太阳系(7)

And how far is that exactly? It's almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormousjust enormous. Let's imagine, for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won't go terribly farjust t

万物简史 第26期:走进太阳系(4)

Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a year's patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. 汤博没有受过成为天文学家的专门训练，

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2.WELCOME TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM 2.欢迎来到太阳系 Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars they can infer the siz

万物简史 第19期:如何营造一个宇宙(11)

Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, believes that there are many universes, possibly an infinite number, each with different attributes, in different combinations, and that we simply live in one that combines things in the way that allows us to

万物简史 第508期:丰富多彩的生命(4)

When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favor the north sides of trees (The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark) 当埃默森富有诗意地谈到苔藓喜欢生长在树木的北侧的时候（在漆黑的夜晚，树干

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Some animals absolutely prospered including, a little surprisingly, the turtles once again. 有的动物再次一片兴旺的景象包括鳖，真有点儿令人感到意外。 As Flannery notes, the period immediately after the dinosaur extinction c

万物简史 第505期:丰富多彩的生命(1)

23 The Richness of Being 第二十三章 丰富多彩的生命 Here and there in the Natural History Museum in London, 在伦敦自然史博物馆的很多地方， built into recesses along the underlit corridors or standing between glass cases of m

万物简史 第469期:生命在前进(11)

What was most surprising, however, was that there were so many body designs that had failed to make the cut, so to speak, and left no descendants. 然而，最令人吃惊的是，如此之多的体形，打个比方说，却缺少深度、没有留下