☊ 碧瓏司の→ßeℒongŚ

MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：
http://online1.tingclass.net/voaspe/…/20160329sa_science.mp3

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🎁 中英文稿：
Carl Sagan once referred to our home planet as [CLIP: "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."] And that poetic description holds true for a lot of exoplanets, too. In fact one of the simplest ways we detect exoplanets is by looking at their sunbeam… and measuring how it dims, ever so slightly, as the exoplanet passes across it, called a transit.
卡爾•薩根曾經這樣描述我們居住的地球：陽光普照下的一顆微小塵埃。而這種詩情畫意的描述對很多外星球來說也是適用的。實際上，我們探測外星球的一個簡單方法就是通過觀察它們的反射光，並且測量光線的衰減情況。隨著外星球運動，外星球的反射光路過太陽的時候會衰減，即使有時候衰減很弱，這種現像被稱為凌。
Which raises an interesting question: "Thinking about extraterrestrial observers—which of them would observe the Earth, moving across our own sun?" Ralph Pudritz, a theoretical astrophysicist at McMaster University in Canada. He and his colleague René Heller quantified the narrow band of space from which any observers on other worlds would be able to see the Earth transiting the sun.
這就引發了一個有趣的問題: 考慮一下地外觀測器——可以用來觀測地球，那麼當我們穿過太陽的時候呢？這是Ralph Pudritz，加拿大McMaster 大學的天體物理學家。他和他的同事René Heller測量了一下在其它宇宙上可以看到地球凌日侍的任何一個觀測器到地球之間的狹長帶的距離。
And they determined that this line of sight would be a plane just half a degree thick, but that cuts through a slice of our galaxy that's estimated to contain 100,000 sunlike stars… along with their companion planets. The analysis is in the journal Astrobiology.
他們確認了這條狹長帶為一個只有半度厚的平面結構，但是卻可以使得像是含有100000個太陽般大小的恆星所在的我們這種銀河系的一部分光線通過， 連同發出光線的星球。該研究分析已經發表在《天體生物學》雜誌上。
Pudritz and Heller suggest that hunters of extraterrestrial life may want to listen particularly closely for signals originating at star systems within that narrow band of galactic sky. Advanced civilizations there may have already detected us using the transit method, they say, and may now be sending us a message. You might think of this paper, then, like a treasure map, for intelligent life. "We don't know if there's treasure out there of course, right? You never know that about a treasure map. But it's a good place to look.”
Pudritz 和Heller 建議，搜尋地外生命體也許需要特別密切注意在一個狹長的星級空間帶中的一個恆星系統發出的原始信號。高等文明也許已經用這種凌日的方法發現了我們的存在，他們說，也許現在這些高等文明正在給我們發信息呢。你也許想看看這片文章，想看一個藏寶圖一樣，尋找智能生命體。我們當然不知道是否有寶藏，對吧?你從來沒見過那個藏寶圖，但是去參觀一下也不錯。
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