涨知识！20张图片带你走进神秘莫测的宇宙

　　现代天文学家认为，宇宙是所有时间、空间、物质的总和，是我们这个物质世界的整体。不依赖于人的意志而客观存在，并处于不断运动和进化中。迄今为止，人类对宇宙的认知还只是冰山一角。

Many of the atoms you're made of, from the calcium in your bones to the iron in your blood, were brewed up in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago.

　　经科学家证实，从人类骨骼中的钙物质到血液里的铁元素，这些构成人类最基本的物质都已在数十亿年前爆炸的星球中心发现。同时，人类体内的大多数氢原子都是在距今137亿年前的宇宙大爆炸中产生的。

In fact, your body contains cosmic relics from the creation of the universe. Almost all of your hydrogen atoms were formed in the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago.

　　这意味着，我们的身体其实深藏着无数宇宙初始的遗迹。

Almost all of ordinary matter (99.9999999% of it) is empty space. If you took out all of the space in our atoms, the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

　　事实上，普通物质的绝大数空间（99.9999999%）都是空的。如果将人类体内原子的这些空间除去，那整个人类都可以装进一个糖立方体中。

When analog television sets aren’t tuned to a channel correctly, it results in static and white noise. Around 1% of that is radiation left over from the Big Bang, better known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This interference between overlapping signals actually allowed Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson to discover the CMB in 1965.

　　当模拟电视旋钮不能准确控制频道时，将会出现静止的图像与嘈杂的声音。这其中约1%的辐射残留是来自于宇宙大爆炸的辐射遗留，被称之为宇宙微波背景辐射（CMB）。1965年，彭齐亚斯和威尔逊发现了宇宙背景辐射，从而为宇宙大爆炸理论提供了重要的依据。

Forty-seven years ago, humankind took its first steps on the moon — and the bootprints will probably still be there a million years from now. That's because the moon has no atmosphere, so there's no wind or water to sweep through and erase the marks.

　　47年前，人类第一次登上月球，完成了人类对宇宙探索的一大步。而在今天，就在距离地球1百万光年的地方，当年的那个脚印仍然可能存在。这是因为，月球上没有风或者水去抹掉那个印记。

When a massive star explodes, its scrunched up core forms something called a neutron star. Neutron stars are so dense that just a teaspoon of their material would weigh more than Mt. Everest. The explosion can spin the neutron star to mind blowing speeds — up to 600 rotations per second.

　　在一次巨大的恒星爆炸后，它形成的核心物质堆积叫做中子星。中子星的密度非常高，据研究一茶匙这种物质的重量比喜马拉雅山还要重。同时，发生恒星爆炸时，旋转中的中子星可达到近乎于风的速度（每秒600次的旋转）。

If you unraveled all of the DNA in your body, it would span 34 billion miles, reaching to Pluto (2.66 billion miles away) and back ... six times.

　　据研究发现，如果人类能够解开体内的全部DNA，它的长度将跨域340亿英里，相当于从地球到冥王星来回往返6次。

The sun makes up 99.86% of the mass of the solar system. It's so big that you could squeeze 1.3 million Earths inside of it.

　　太阳的质量和体积都相当巨大，其质量占太阳系质量的99.86%，并且能够装下130万个地球。

Outer space is silent. Eerily silent. That's because sound waves need some sort of medium to travel through. And space is a vacuum. A dark, silent vacuum.

　　因为声音的传播是需要各种媒介去传输的，而宇宙空间呈现真空状态，所以宇宙中是绝对无声的。

　　脉冲星是磁化的中子星，不断的快速旋转同时发射出辐射。这个已知最快的脉冲星是位于射手座中的PSRJ1748-2446ad，距离地球18000光年。虽然它属于体积中等的中子星，但它以每秒716次的惊人速度旋转着。这几乎达到了光速的四分之一。

Ordinary, observable matter (like stars and planets) makes up a measly 5% of the universe. The other 95% universe is made up of invisible dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%). That means there's 95% of the universe that we don't know about yet.

　　通常意义上，可观察的物质（例如恒星与行星）只占据宇宙的5%。宇宙另外95%的空间是由不可见暗能量（68%）和暗物质（27%）组成。这就意味着，宇宙的95%的空间依然是未知的。

It takes 24 hours for Earth to rotate on its axis to make a day, and 365 days to orbit around the sun for a year. It takes around 230 million years for our solar system to complete a single orbit around the Milky Way. The last time it was in its current position, the earliest dinosaurs had just appeared, and flowering plants wouldn’t evolve for another 100 million years.

　　地球自转一圈为24小时，围绕太阳公转一圈即365天。它完成一个围绕银河系的单一轨道用时23000万年。

Our solar system may smell like hot metal and seared steak, but what about the middle of the Milky Way? According to recent research from the Max Plank Institute, it smells like raspberries and tastes like rum. They found that ethyl formate, a key chemical component for both raspberries and rum, can be readily found at the center of our galaxy.

　　我们的太阳系也许闻起来像是炙热的金属或者是烤牛排，但是银河的味道呢？根据马克思普朗克研究所的最新研究，银河中心或许闻起来像覆盆子，尝起来则会像是朗姆酒。这是因为在银河系中心检测出了一种叫做甲酸乙酯的化学成分，它是覆盆子与朗姆酒共同含有的一个关键化学部分。

One year on Venus is equal to 224 Earth days. And one day on Venus is equal to 243 Earth days. Which makes a day on Venus longer than a year. And to top it off, Venus is the only planet in our solar system that rotates backwards.

　　金星的1年相当于地球的224天，1天则相当于地球的243天。所以在金星上，一天的时间要比一年长。更奇妙的是，金星是太阳系唯一一个向后转动的行星。

If you have ever wished there were more hours in the day, just be patient. Every century, Earth’s rotation slows down by about 1.4 milliseconds. When the dinosaurs were around, a day lasted about 23 hours. NASA reports that Earth’s rotation was exactly 24 hours in 1820, but is now off by 2.5 milliseconds.

　　如果你希望每天能够有更多的时间，那只需多等待几个世纪。因为地球的旋转速度在以1.4毫秒的速度减慢。在中生代时期，一天约是23个小时。而根据美国宇航局调查发现，在1820年，地球旋转的时间为24小时，但是现在的时间已经增加了2.5毫秒。

If you touch two pieces of the same type of metal together in the vacuum of space, they will fuse, bound together until eternity (or until you break them apart).

　　如果你在真空条件下触摸同一种金属的两个碎片，它们将一直相互趋近然后反弹，再趋近再反弹。

Though the birth and death of stars don't happen instantaneously, the process happens fairly frequently. By using observed star formation and supernova events within the Milky Way, astronomers have estimated that 275 million stars are born and die throughout the observable universe each day. This totals more than 100 billion over the course of a year.

　　恒星的诞生与消亡不会突如其来的发生，并且这个过程也不会很频繁。但是通过观察银河系中恒星的形成和超新星事件，天文学家估测每天都有近27500万个恒星形成与消亡。在一年中，总数超过1000亿个。

There might be as many as three sextillion stars in the universe. That's 3 followed by 23 zeros, or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's more than all of the grains of sand on Earth.

　　据天文学家估算，在宇宙中有多达300万的6次方个行星。那是3后面23个0，意味着比地球上的谷粒还要多。

Light from some stars takes so long to travel to our eyes that when you look at the star-speckled night sky you're actually peering deep into the past. NASA's Hubble Telescope can look as far back as 13 billion years ago.

　　当星星的光芒传到人们眼中时，实际上，这已经是13亿年前的光了。

Gliese 436 b is a Neptune-sized exoplanet located about 33 light-years away in the constellation Leo. Astronomers believe that it embodies exotic states of water that causes its surface to be covered in burning ice. The pressure on the planet forces the ice to stay solid, but the extreme surface temperature of 570° F (300° C) superheats the water, causing it to come off as steam.

　　Gliese436b是一个位于狮子星座左侧33光年左右的外行星。天文学家相信，它其中存在着水源，由于星球上的压力使其产生异常坚固的冰，但同时，570华氏度（相当于300摄氏度）的表面温度又促使它们化作蒸汽蒸发掉了。（编译孙小萌）

2016年12月13日00:00 来源：大河网综合责任编辑：林辉