探索频道英语听力 Cosmos 宇宙的边疆05
2009-10-16来源:和谐英语
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We continue to plummet, falling thousands of light years towards the plane of the galaxy. This is the Milky Way - our galaxy seen edge-on, billions of nuclear furnaces converting matter into starlight. Some stars are flimsy as a soap bubble; others are a hundred trillion times denser than lead; the hottest stars are destined to die young; but red giants are mostly elderly. Such stars are unlikely to have inhabited planets. But yellow dwarf stars, like the sun, are middle-aged, and they are far more common. These stars may have planetary systems, and on such planets for the first time in our cosmic voyage we encounter rare forms of matter - ice and rock, air and liquid water.
Close to this yellow star is a small warm cloudy world with continents and oceans. These conditions permit an even more precious form of matter to arise: Life. But this is not the earth; intelligent beings have evolved and reworked this planetary surface in a massive engineering enterprise. In the Milky Way galaxy, there may be many worlds on which matter has grown to consciousness. I wonder, are they very different from us? What do they look like? What are their politics, technology, music, religion? Or do they have patterns of culture we can't begin to imagine? Are they also a danger to themselves?
filament n.细丝, 灯丝
unravel vi. 解开; 散开
pulsar n.[天]脉冲星
beacon n. 灯塔
doleful adj.悲哀的, 阴沉的
plummet vi.垂直落下