1 2 August 2006 In the Belly of the Beast

2 每天晚上穿越行星, 天文學家使用最先進的儀器 to tease away new details about 宇宙, 並且有時候他們盡力捕捉一些相當奇 妙的事件. Take the case of WD , a collapsed star known as a white dwarf. 以由 the European Southern Observatory‘s Very Large Telescope in Chile 所收集的軌跡及溫 度資料為依據, 一個研究團隊已經決定當 WD was a much bigger red giant star, it swallowed a nearby planet like object called a brown dwarf, which miraculously survived the experience.

3 這之間的關係並不總是如此的混亂. Once, the two objects were as far apart as Earth and the sun. 但當恆星接近其生命 終點時, 他膨脹到比原始大小的 100 倍大, becoming a hydrogen-filled red giant big enough to overtake the brown dwarf. As the brown dwarf plowed through the red giant's atmosphere, it began to orbit the giant less quickly, drawing the two objects closer together. They now circle each other at a distance of only about 400,000 kilometers, or about the space between Earth and the moon.

4 儘管如此, there‘s the question of how the brown dwarf made it out alive. 這答案, says team member Matt Burleigh of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, is that the red giant’s mostly hydrogen atmosphere was much less dense than the brown dwarf‘s mostly nitrogen envelope. 此外, the team reports tomorrow in Nature, the engulfment lasted for only a few thousand years--a wink of an eye in cosmic timeframes.

5 Though the brown dwarf survived no worse for wear, the same could not be said for the red giant. "The shock waves generated by this encounter ripped apart the red giant," says lead researcher Pierre Maxted of Keele University, also in the U.K. What's left is a rather odd combination of a Jupiter-sized planet closely orbiting a terrestrial-sized but more massive star.

6 天文學家 Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, 美國馬里蘭州, 認為此發現 “ 相當具 有說服力的 ” 並說 it shows that objects other than black holes and pulsars can survive a plunge through the interior of a giant star. 他說此研究下一必然的步驟即是找出是否 brown dwarfs that have undergone such a swallowing process are any different from their uningested counterparts.