外刊阅读练习：光学方法帮助寻找其他太阳系的生命.docVIP

在线学英语 体验请申请： HYPERLINK /ielts/xd.html /ielts/xd.html 洛基英语，中国在线英语教育领导品牌 Science and technology. 科技。 The search for alien life 寻找外星生物 Twinkle, twinkle, little planet 闪烁吧，小行星 An undervalued optical trick may help to find life in other solar systems 一个不被人重视的光学方法可能能帮助寻找其他太阳系的生命 MOST astronomical telescopes employ reflection tofocus starlight. A concave mirror creates an image from this light using a design pioneered in the 17th century, by Sir Isaac Newton. Those telescopes that do not employ reflection use refraction. They have a system of lenses, an idea first used to look at the stars by Galileo. 大部分天文望远镜都是运用的焦点星光的反射原理。早在17世纪，艾萨克.牛顿就开创性的利用这个光，让凹透镜产生了一个图像。那些不利用反射的望远镜利用的是折射。他们有透镜系统。利用透镜系统的想法最早是伽利略用来观测星星的。 But there is a third way to focus light. A century and a half after Newton, and more than two after Galileo, a Frenchman called Augustin-Jean Fresnel worked out that you can do it using diffraction. A set of concentric rings, alternately transparent and opaque, will scatter and spread light waves in a manner that causes them to reinforce each other some distance away, and thus form an image. The rings are known as a zone plate. And Fresnels countryman, Laurent Koechlin, of the Midi-Pyrenees observatory, thinks zone plates are the way to find out if there is life on other planets. 但还存在第三种聚焦光源的方法。在牛顿利用星光的150年后，伽利略的透镜系统的两百多年后，一个名叫奥古斯丁.让.菲涅尔的法国人想到也可以利用衍射来达到目的。一组兼有透明和不透明的同轴环可以分散和传播光波，并且在稍远的地方可以再使他们重新聚焦，由此形成一个图像。这些环被称作波带片。法国南比利牛斯天文台劳伦.凯什兰认为波带片可以用来寻找其他星球上是否存在生命。 Seeing oxygen in another planets atmosphere would be a giveaway of biological activity because the gas is so reactive that it needs to be continuously renewed. That would almost certainlymean something akin to photosynthesis was going on, for no known non-biological process canproduce oxygen from common materials in sufficient quantity. Looking at such an atmosphere, though, is tricky. Stars are so much brighter than the planets which orbit them that their light overwhelms the small amount reflected from a plan