【名师带你背单词】TED Talk精选《如何在其他星球寻找生命》Part1/3,曼拓教育微信公众号文章

Donovan老师

今天我们来看看这篇在PTE听力中常考的天文类文章。

How we'll find life on other planets （Part 1/3）

相关学科：天文学

Source：

http://www.ted.com/talks/aomawa_shields_how_we_ll_find_life_on_other_planets

Donovan老师

下面带着对这些单词和短语的理解，尝试读一读下面的原文，看看是不是容易理解多了呢？

I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. But I know that it's there. And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it.

On our planet, where there's water, there's life. So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. What I do picks up where their job ends. I model the possible climates of exoplanets. And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life.

Take the planet Venus. It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. That's hot enough to melt lead. Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life.

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