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  3. Billions of years before the Sun was born, the Milky Way galaxy flicked out its gravitational tongue and swallow down a tiny nei

Billions of years before the Sun was born, the Milky Way galaxy flicked out its gravitational tongue and swallow down a tiny nei

admin2013-07-02  31
问题     Billions of years before the Sun was born, the Milky Way galaxy flicked out its gravitational tongue and swallow down a tiny neighboring galaxy that had ventured too close. The evidence for that ancient act of cosmic cannibalism(同类相食)is the still-digesting remains of the meal: a handful of relatively nearby stars known as the Helmi Stream, whose weird orbits are a tipoff to their weird origin.

    Now one of those stars has a second claim to fame. HIP 13044, as it’s unglamor-ously known, has a planet whirling around it — the first planet ever found from outside the Milky Way. Aside from its extra-galactic origin, the planet itself isn’t especially remarkable. It’s a bit bigger than Jupiter and orbits its parent star in about 16 days — a "year" so short it would once have been considered impossible for so giant a planet, until multiple discoveries of many similar worlds proved such a revolution rate to be pretty common.
    It’s the star itself that makes the discovery of a planet surprising, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, its age — perhaps 7 or 8 billion years — means that while HIP 13044 was once much like the Sun, it’s gone through a dramatic change of life. As it burned through its supply of hydrogen(氢), the star would have swelled to become a so-called red giant, tens, or even hundreds of times its original size. When that happens to our Sun billions of years from now, Earth will probably be destroyed. Indeed, there’s some circumstantial evidence that HIP 13044 may have gulped down a few planets itself, says the paper’s lead author Johny Setiawan, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg.
    But the new planet, called HIP 13044b, survived the disaster. That’s probably because the Jupiter-size world originally occupied a Jupiter-like orbit, much farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun. It spiraled in to its present orbit only after HIP 13044 shrank back to a more dignified size — another common stage of life for stars, which return to their original dimensions when they start burning the helium(氦)in their core.
    The other thing that makes the star unusual is its composition. The Sun is mostly hydrogen and helium, but it also has significant traces of heavier elements like oxygen, carbon and iron, a quality astronomers call "metallicity" despite the non-metallic nature of some of those elements. "In the Milky Way, " says Setiawan, "the more metals a star has , the more likely it is to have planets. "
    Dwarf galaxies like the one in which HIP 13044 was born, however, have stars that are notably metal-poor. It was unclear until now whether that meant they’d also be planet-poor. The fact that Setiawan and his colleague Rainer Klement found one so easily suggests this isn’t the case. "Either they were incredibly lucky, " says Eric Ford, a planet-searcher at the University of Florida, "or planets aren’t uncommon around stars like these."
    Whatever the answer, HIP 13044b is clearly a very different world from any we’ve seen before, one that — without the aid of celestial metals — formed in a very different way. And that in turn suggests that the field of planetary science, which seemed so tidy and settled as recently as the 1990s, is still full of surprises.
Which of the following can be the best title?
选项 A、A New Planet — from Beyond the Galaxy
B、Stars from Dwarf Galaxies Also Have Planets
C、Discovery of HIP 13044 Surprises Science Field
D、The Formation of HIP 13044 And Its Planet
答案A
解析 主旨大意题。第一段介绍了Helmi Stream是宇宙中的同类相食行为的证据。第二段讲Helmi Stream中的一颗恒星被发现具有一颗行星。第三至第四段说明了HIP 13044经历了膨胀和缩小的过程，及这颗新发现的行星得以幸存的可能原因。第五至第六段讨论了恒星金属性和行星数目之间的联系。第七段作者总结这颗行星的发现是科学界的惊喜，也说明仍有很多惊喜有待探索。综上所述，[A]项最为准确。
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