13个最伟大天文发现(中).doc

13个最伟大的天文发现(中) 　　为纪念伽利略首次使用望远镜进行天文观测400周年,在国际天文学联合会和联合国教科文组织的共同倡议下,联合国大会将2009年正式定为国际天文年,并将其主题定为“探索我们的宇宙”。上期“专题”,小编为大家带来了天文史早期的六个最伟大发现,由于后七个发现篇幅较长,原定分上下两期的节目不得不延长至三期。本期将带来四个新发现,最新发现请关注下期“专题”。 　　 　　General Relativity 　　Discover: Albert Einstein 　　Thanks to the musings[沉思] of an obscure[无名的] 　　clerk working in a Swiss patent[专利权] office, our next great discovery revealed that the universe is a strange mysterious place. That clerk was Albert Einstein. 　　In the early 1900s, he was puzzled, along with the rest of the scientific community, by the orbit of the planet Mercury. Despite the ability of Newton’s laws of gravity to precisely predict the motion of the planets, the laws failed when it came to correctly predicting Mercury’s orbit. The puzzle had to do with Mercury’s perihelion[近日点], that point in its orbit where it’s closest to the sun. Every century Mercury’s perihelion advanced slightly, a change that Newton’s equations[方程] could not account for. 　　In a bold and startling move, young Einstein proposed his own theory to explain the puzzle of Mercury’s orbit and in the process developed a theory that refined Newton’s laws of gravity. Einstein believed that his concept of “curved space” was responsible for shifting Mercury’s orbit. 　　Einstein called his idea, “the theory of general relativity.” The idea that space itself was warped[扭曲] by mass was too strange for many to accept. An approaching solar eclipse[日蚀] gave scientists the perfect opportunity to put Einstein’s new theory to the test. Photographs were taken of the background stars before the eclipse, and then afterwards. These pictures were then compared with photos taken during the eclipse. The photos showed that the positions of the stars in the eclipse photo shifted slightly inward, bending as the light from the stars passed the sun’s gravitational field. Einstein’s theory of general relativity was right. His great discovery rocked the world. 　　 　　The Universe Is Expanding 　　Discover: Edwin Hub