2022考研英语阅读外刊精读：天文学家看到黑洞吞噬中子星

Cosmic Gulp: Astronomers See Black Hole Swallow Neutron Star

宇宙吞噬:天文学家看到黑洞吞噬中子星

Talk about a heavy snack. For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a black hole swallowing a neutron star, the most dense object in the universe — all in a split-second gulp.

说一个重大新闻。天文学家第一次目睹了一个黑洞吞噬了宇宙中密度最大的物体——中子星——这一切都发生在一瞬间。

Ten days later they saw the same thing, on the other side of the universe. In both cases, a neutron star— a teaspoon of which would weigh a billion tons — orbits ever closer to that ultimate point of no return, a black hole, until they finally crash together and the neutron star is gone in a gobble.

10天后，他们在宇宙的另一边看到了同样的景象。在这两种情况下，一颗中子星——一茶匙的中子星重达10亿吨——的轨道会越来越接近黑洞这一不可逆转的点，直到它们最终相撞，中子星被吞噬。

Astronomers witnessed the last 500 orbits before the neutron stars were swallowed, a process that took far less than a minute and briefly generated as much energy as all the visible light in the observable universe.

天文学家目睹了中子星被吞噬前最后500个轨道，这一过程用了不到一分钟的时间，并在短时间内产生了相当于可观测宇宙中所有可见光的能量。

“It was just a big quick (gulp), gone,” said study co-author Patrick Brady, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The black hole “gets a nice dinner of a neutron star and makes itself just a little bit more massive.”

威斯康星大学密尔沃基分校的天体物理学家，该研究的合著者帕特里克·布雷迪说：“它只是一大口就消失了。”黑洞“享用了一顿中子星的美餐，并仅仅使自己的质量增加了一点点。”