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...
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...
So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one-quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. 因此，如果冥...
As for Pluto itself, nobody is quite sure how big it is, or what it is made of, what kind of atmosphere it has, or even what it really is. A lot of astronomers believe it isn't a planet at all, but merely the largest object so far found in a zone of...
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，...
One nice touch about Christy's discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. 克里斯蒂...
This was actually something of a blow to Pluto's status as a planet, which had never been terribly robust anyway. Since previously the space occupied by the moon and the space occupied by Pluto were thought to be one and the same, it meant that Pluto...
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...
For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of peoplenamely that it couldn't begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted excl...
The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet's surface, he wo...
