太空中真的漆黑一片吗？

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Look up at the night sky and, if you're away from city lights, you'll see stars.

抬头看看夜空，如果你远离城市的灯光，你会看到星星。

The space between those bright points of light is, of course, filled with inky blackness.

这些明亮的光点之间的空间，当然，充满了漆黑。

Some astronomers have wondered about that all that dark space--about how dark it really is.

一些天文学家想知道关于黑暗空间的一切——关于它到底有多黑暗。

"Is space truly black?" says Tod Lauer, an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona.

亚利桑那州国家光学天文台的天文学家塔德·劳尔说:“太空真的是漆黑一片的吗?”

He says if you could look at the night sky without stars, galaxies, and everything else known to give off visible light, "does the universe itself put out a glow?"

他说，如果你可以观察没有星星、星系和其他所有已知可以发出可见光的东西的夜空，“宇宙本身会湮灭光芒吗?”

It's a tough question that astronomers have tried to answer for decades.

几十年来，天文学家们一直试图回答这个棘手的问题。

Now, Lauer and other researchers with NASA's New Horizons space mission say they've finally been able to do it, using a spacecraft that's travelling far beyond the dwarf planet Pluto.

现在，劳尔和美国宇航局“新地平线”太空任务的其他研究人员表示，他们终于能够做到这一点了，他们使用的航天器已经越过了 矮行星冥王星。

The group has posted their work online, and it will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

该小组已经在网上发布了他们的研究成果，并将很快发表在《天体物理学杂志》上。

New Horizons was originally designed to explore Pluto, but after whizzing past the dwarf planet in 2015, the intrepid spacecraft just kept going.

新视野号原本是设计用来探索冥王星的，但在2015年飞速掠过这颗矮行星后，这艘无畏的飞船继续前进。

It's now more than four billion miles from home—nearly 50 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth is.

现在它与地球的距离超过40亿英里——几乎是地球与太阳距离的50倍。

That's important because it means the spacecraft is far from major sources of light contamination that make it impossible to detect any tiny light signal from the universe itself.

这很重要，因为这意味着航天器远离主要的光污染源，而光污染源使航天器不可能探测到来自宇宙本身的任何微小光信号。

Around Earth and the inner solar system, for example, space is filled with dust particles that get lit up by the Sun, creating a diffuse glow over the entire sky.

例如，在地球周围和太阳系内部，太空中充满了被太阳照亮的尘埃粒子，在整个天空中形成了漫反射的辉光。

But that dust isn't a problem out where New Horizons is.

但在新地平线号所在的地方，这些尘埃并不是问题。

Plus, out there, the sunlight is much weaker.

另外，在那里，阳光要弱得多。

To try to detect the faint glow of the universe, researchers went through images taken by the spacecraft's simple telescope and camera and looked for ones that were incredibly boring.

为了探测宇宙微弱的光芒，研究人员浏览了飞船上简单的望远镜和照相机拍摄的图像，寻找一些极其无聊的图像。

"The images were all of what you just simply call blank sky. There's a sprinkling of faint stars, there's a sprinkling of faint galaxies, but it looks random," says Lauer.

“这些图像都是你所谓的空白天空。有少量微弱的恒星，有少量微弱的星系，但它看起来是随机的，”劳尔说。

"What you want is a place that doesn't have many bright stars in the images or bright stars even outside the field that can scatter light back into the camera."

“你想要的是图像中没有太多亮星星的地方，或者即使在外部也没有那种能把光线散射回相机的亮星星的地方。”

Then they processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light.

然后他们对这些图像进行了处理，去除所有已知的可见光。

Once they'd subtracted out the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way and any stray light that might be a result of camera quirks, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy.

一旦他们把来自恒星的光，加上来自银河系的散射光和任何可能是由于照相机的毛病造成的杂散光都去掉后，就只剩下来自我们银河系以外的光了。

They then went a step further still, subtracting out light that they could attribute to all the galaxies thought to be out there.

然后他们更进一步，减去他们认为存在于宇宙中的所有星系发出的光。

And it turns out, once that was done, there was still plenty of unexplained light.

事实证明，一旦这一切完成，仍然有大量无法解释来源的光。

In fact, the amount of light coming from mysterious sources was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies, says Marc Postman, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

马里兰州巴尔的摩市太空望远镜科学研究所的天文学家马克·波兹曼说，事实上，来自神秘来源的光的数量大约等于所有来自已知星系的光的数量。

So maybe there are unrecognized galaxies out there, he says, "or some other source of light that we don't yet know what it is."

因此，他说，也许有一些未被识别的星系，“或者一些我们还不知道的光源。”

问题

文中提到太空中是漆黑一片吗？

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