國家地理(兒童專欄)- 天體物理學家

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People think black hole, and so then you think sort of like a hole like Wile coyote fell into when he was chasing the roadrunner. But it's not quite like that.

當人們想到黑洞，你會認為這是一個像狼人懷爾在追逐跑路者時掉進去的洞。但事實並非如此。

It's four-dimensional just like we are. My name is Jedidah Isler.

它和我們一樣是四維的。我叫耶迪達·艾斯勒。

I have a PhD in astrophysics. And I study supermassive, hyperactive, black holes called "blazars".

我是天體物理學博士。我研究的是特大質量、極度活躍的黑洞，叫做「耀變體」。

A black hole is an object that is so massive that not even light can escape it. A blazar is a special class of black hole that is super massive and by that, I mean something that's a billion times the mass of the sun.

黑洞是一個巨大到連光都無法逃脫的天體。耀變體黑洞是一類特殊的黑洞，它的質量是太陽的十億倍。

I study those and they're special because somehow, somewhere near the black hole is able to spin up these jets of material that are going 99.99% of the speed of light. I like to think of it as a cosmic super soaker that's just shooting out material.

我研究過這些東西，它們很特別，因為出於某種原因，黑洞附近的某個地方，能夠旋轉出這些噴流的物質，它們的速度是光速的99. 99%。我喜歡把它想像成一個宇宙超級浸水器，它在噴射物質。

And I think that's super cool. What people are thinking when they say black hole are thinking "oh when I look at it I see a void where nothing else is".

我認為這非常酷。人們在說黑洞的時候所想的是 "哦，當我看到它的時候，我看到的是一個虛無的地方，其他什麼都沒有"。

But it's not. . . it's not a hole, it's four-dimensional just like we are. The reason they're black is because not even light can escape the pull that gravity provides from the black hole itself.

但它不是……它不是一個洞，它是四維的，就像我們一樣。它們之所以是黑色的，是因為即使是光也無法逃脫黑洞本身的引力。

Everything has gravity. But the more massive you are, the stronger that gravity is.

一切物體都有重力。但是你的質量越大，引力就越強。

If you have things that are very massive and they are say orbiting one another and two black holes collide, that's two massive bodies having huge eruptions of energy. They can actually cause a ripple in space-time itself.

如果有非常巨大的東西，說是互相繞著對方的軌道運行，那就是兩個黑洞相撞，那就是兩個巨大的天體爆發出巨大的能量。它們實際上可以在時空中引起漣漪。

And that's why it's an amazing discovery! If you imagine sort of a pebble falling into a pond, space and time are that pond and the drop of the pebble is the first time the two black holes collide.

這就是為什麼這是一個驚人的發現！如果你想像一顆小石子掉進池塘，空間和時間就是那個池塘，小石子的掉落是兩個黑洞第一次碰撞。

That ripple through the water is the ripple in space-time, except we would be sitting in the pond and feeling that ripple as well. My work is an important contribution to the world.

穿過水麵的漣漪就是時空的漣漪，只不過我們坐在池塘裡也能感受到它的漣漪。我的工作是對這個世界的重要貢獻。

Because there's so much to learn. So in some ways doing this work at all, trying to understand how the universe works is a contribution to the larger body of knowledge that exists.

因為要學的東西太多。所以在某種程度上，做這項工作，試圖理解宇宙是如何運作的是對存在的更大的知識體的一種貢獻。