#大學英語聽力#

In the nearly five years since their first direct detection, gravitational waves have become one of the hottest topics in astronomy.

自第一次直接探測到引力波以來的近五年中，引力波已經成為天文學中最熱門的話題之一。

With facilities such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), researchers have mostly used these ripples in spacetime to study the inner workings of merging black holes, but LIGO has also detected gravitational waves from other sorts of celestial crashes, such as the collisions of ultradense stellar remnants called neutron stars.

利用鐳射干涉儀引力波天文臺(LIGO)等設施，研究人員大多利用時空中的這些漣漪來研究合併黑洞的內部工作，但LIGO也探測到了來自其他種類的天體碰撞的引力波，例如被稱為中子星的超密恆星殘骸的碰撞。

Sometimes, however, LIGO serves up gravitational waves that leave astronomers scratching their heads—as was the case for GW190425, an event detected last April that was recently attributed to a neutron star merger.

然而，有時LIGO提供的引力波讓天文學家撓頭-GW190425就是這樣的情況，去年4月探測到的一個事件最近被歸因於中子星合併。

The trouble is that LIGO’s data suggest this neutron star pair was substantially overweight—collectively, some 3.4 times the mass of the sun, which is half a solar mass heavier than the most massive neutron star binaries ever seen.

問題在於，ligo的資料表明，這對中子星的重量相當超重-合計約為太陽品質的3.4倍，比有史以來最大品質的中子星雙星的太陽品質重一半。

“It is the heaviest known by a pretty wide margin,” says Chad Hanna, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University who hunts gravitational waves.

賓夕法尼亞州立大學(Pennsylvania State University)的天體物理學家查德·漢納(Chad Hanna)說：“從相當大的邊際來看，這是已知的最重的行星。”他是一位研究引力波的天體物理學家。