An artist's rendition shows Quaoar.
（该新天体的想象画）
Monday, October 07, 2002
（解仁江今晨翻译自美国福克斯新闻网 ）
LOS ANGELES — A billion miles beyond Pluto, astronomers have discovered a frozen celestial body 800 miles across -- the biggest find in the solar system since the ninth planet was spotted 72 years ago. But astronomers do not consider the newfound object a planet.
洛杉矶消息——天文学家在冥王星以外十亿英里处发现一直径800英里的冰冷的天体。这是自从72年前发现冥王星以来在太阳系中最大的发现。
The object is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles. It is only half the size of Pluto, which some astronomers have come to believe should not have been designated a planet at all.
该天体大约是1/10个地球直径，在距离太阳40亿英里处每288年公转一周。他的大小只有冥王星的一半，有些天文学家已经开始认为冥王星根本不应该被划分为行星。
Planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo discovered the object in images taken June 4. They were to announce their discovery Monday in Birmingham, Ala., at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's division of planetary sciences.
位于Pasadena的加州科技学院的行星天文学家迈克布朗和博士后Chadwick Trujillo 7月4日通过照相发现了它。他们周一在阿拉巴马州伯明罕的美国天文学会行星科学分会的一次会议上公布了他们的发现。
"It's about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big," Brown said.
“它相当于把所有小行星合起来的大小，所以这个东西真地很大了！”布朗说到。
The two used a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to discover the world, provisionally dubbed Quaoar (pronounced kwah-o-wahr), a creation force in Southern California Indian mythology. Follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed its size.
他们两人利用圣迭哥附近的帕洛马天文台一架望远镜发现了该天体，并暂时命名它为“Quaoar”（公告中是kwah-o-wahr）南加州印地安神话中的创造万物力量。随后他们用哈勃太空望远镜对其大小进行了确认。
Archival research showed Quaoar had been captured on film as long ago as 1982, but was never noticed, Brown said. He and Trujillo went back and pored over the older images to help pin down the circular path it travels around the sun.
在调查档案中发现早在1982年Quaoar就已经被胶片拍摄到过，但是从来没有被注意到，布朗说。他和Trujillo回去反复研究了这些老图片以帮助他们确定它环绕太阳公转的轨道。
"It could easily have been detected 20 years ago, but it wasn't," Brown said.
“20多年前就可以轻易探测到它，但是却没有。”布朗说。
Quaoar lies in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of objects made of ice and rock that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. The objects are considered fossil remnants of the swirling disk of debris that coalesced to form the solar system roughly 5 billion years ago. It is also believed to be the source of some comets.
Quaoar 位于柯依伯带，海王星以外一大群由冰和岩石构成的天体中。柯依伯带被认为是50亿年前形成太阳系的原行星盘的古老的残留物质。它也是彗星的来源。
The belt contains as many as 10 billion objects at least one mile across; astronomers estimate five to 10 of those are jumbo-sized.
在柯依伯带中直径1英里的距离中就有至少100亿个天体；天文学家估计它们中可能有5到10个是体积巨大的。
"This new discovery fits right in with our expectation that there should be a handful or two of objects as large as Pluto," said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii. Jewitt, with then-colleague Jane Luu, discovered the first Kuiper Belt object just a decade ago.
“这一发现印证了在柯依伯带中应该有2个到10个左右的冥王星大小的天体的预言，”夏威夷的天文学家大卫杰维特说，他和他的同事简路10年前发现了第一个柯依伯带天体。
As larger Kuiper Belt objects turn up, the case for Pluto as a planet weakens, astronomers said. Pluto lies within the Kuiper Belt and is considered by many merely among the largest of the bunch, and not a planet in its own right.
随着新发现的柯依伯带天体体积不断的增加，冥王星作为行星的地位不断受到动摇，天文学家们说，冥王星位于柯依伯带，它被很多人认为只是柯依伯带天体中最大的一个，不是一颗行星。
"It's pretty clear, if we discovered Pluto today, knowing what we know about other objects in the Kuiper Belt, we wouldn't even consider it a planet," Brown said.
“很明显，如果冥王星是在知道了柯依伯带存在其他天体的今天发现的，我们甚至不会认定它是颗行星，”布朗说。
Astronomers expect yet-undiscovered Kuiper Belt objects may rival even Pluto.
天文学家预计柯依伯带中可能会发现比冥王星大的天体。
"An observation like this just confirms that, that we may discover Kuiper Belt objects bigger than Pluto," said Frank Summers, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
“一次这样的观测就可以印证柯依伯带中可能会发现比冥王星大的天体，”福兰克萨莫斯说道，他是位于巴尔的摩的太空望远镜科学院的一位天体物理学家。
NASA is considering launching a spacecraft to explore Pluto, its moon, Charon, and at least one Kuiper Belt object, but whether it will be funded remains unclear. The New Horizons mission could launch as early as 2006, and would take about a decade to reach Pluto.
美国宇航局正考虑发射一颗探测飞船前往探索冥王星，和它的卫星查龙，以及至少一颗柯依伯带天体，但是这一计划是否能被给予资助还不得而知。“新地平线”探测计划的飞船最早将于2006年发射升空，可能要10年后才能抵达冥王星。 |
|
置顶卡
变色卡
千斤顶
显身卡
