#大學英語聽力#
In July and August of 2016, astronomers noticed something really strange in the data from the Gaia space observatory.
2016年7月和8月，天文學家在蓋亞空間天文臺的資料中發現了一些非常奇怪的東西。
A distant star oddly brightened, then dimmed.
一顆遙遠的星星奇怪地變亮了，然後變暗了。
A few weeks later, it brightened again, and dimmed again.
幾個星期後，它又變亮了，又變暗了。
This odd behaviour wasn't because of anything the star was doing; rather, the gravity of an invisible object between us and it was warping the fabric of space-time, magnifying the star's light as it passed through.
這種奇怪的行為並不是因為恆星所做的任何事情；而是因為我們和它之間的無形物體的引力扭曲了時空的結構，放大了恆星通過時的光線。
Now astronomers have figured out what that invisible object is: a binary star 2,544 light-years away that's so dim we can't see it at all.
現在天文學家已經弄清楚了這個看不見的物體是什麼：一顆距離我們2544光年遠的雙星，它太暗了，我們根本看不見它。
Yet, based on the way the star's gravity magnifies light, astronomers were able to calculate its mass, distance and orbit of the system.
然而，基於恆星的引力放大光的方式，天文學家能夠計算出它的品質，距離和系統的軌道。
These techniques, they say, could be a way to locate other hidden massive objects in the Milky Way galaxy - such as the estimated millions of lone stellar mass black holes out there.
他們說，這些技術可能是定位銀河系中其他隱藏的大品質物體的一種方法-例如估計那裡有數百萬個孤獨的恆星品質黑洞。
The big clue as to the nature of the system, according to a team of astronomers, was the repeated brightening and dimming of the source object.
根據一組天文學家的說法，關於該系統性質的一大線索是源物體的反覆變亮和變暗。
The event has since been named Gaia16aye.
這項活動後來被命名為Gaia16aye。
"If you have a single lens, caused by a single object, there would be just a small, steady rise in brightness and then there would be a smooth decline as the lens passes in front of the distant source and then moves away," said astronomer Łukasz Wyrzykowski from the University of Warsaw in Poland.
波蘭華沙大學的天文學家Łukasz Wyrzykowski說：“如果你只有一個鏡頭，由一個物體引起，那麼亮度只會有一個小的，穩定的上升，然後隨著鏡頭經過遠處的光源然後移動，就會有一個平穩的下降。”。
"In this case, not only did the star brightness drop sharply rather than smoothly, but after a couple of weeks it brightened up again, which is very unusual. Over the 500 days of observation, we have seen it brighten up and decline five times."
“在這種情況下，不僅恆星亮度急劇下降，而不是平穩地下降，而且幾周後它又變亮了，這是非常不尋常的。在500天的觀測中，我們已經看到它變亮和下降了五次。”