Supermassive Black Holes 超大质量黑洞 - 10

If, as it now seems, every single galaxy¹ has a black hole at its heart, this can't be a coincidence. Perhaps black holes are an essential part of what galaxies² are and how they work.

No one had expected that black hole size and galaxy size could possibly be related. It suggested some mysterious invisible connection between a galaxy and its black hole. But what this was was a mystery scientists would have to wait three years to solve.

The first breakthrough came when a new instrument was added to Hubble Space Telescope. This dramatically accelerated the discovery of new black holes, giving scientists a wealth of new potential leads to follow. For three years the data has been coming down to Earth. Amongst those who've been sifting³ through it, are two young competing researchers. What they were to discover this year would turn the world of cosmology on its head.

Everyday I go to work, I don't really know what's going to happen, but I can count that it's going to be something exciting every single day.

These past six months have been phenomenal in terms of black hole research. We've been extremely excited we were finding these black holes in, in, in numbers that we had never been able to do before.

Karl Gebhardt and Laura Ferrarese were trying to find the fundamental connection linking black holes and their galaxies. So they searched through all the different galaxy characteristics, looking for any new links that might give a clue. But it wasn't until they looked at the property called sigma that the mystery began to unravel⁴.

Sigma is just a very, very fancy name for something that's actually very simple.

Sigma is the speed at which the stars are circling in the outer reaches of the galaxy. The stars at the edge of the galaxy are so far away from the black hole that they are completely unaffected by its gravity.

wealth: an abundance or profusion of something desirable

unravel: investigate and solve (a mystery or puzzle)

1 galaxy   

n.星系；银河系；一群(杰出或著名的人物)

参考例句：

• The earth is one of the planets in the Galaxy.地球是银河系中的星球之一。
• The company has a galaxy of talent.该公司拥有一批优秀的人才。

2 galaxies   

星系( galaxy的名词复数 )； 银河系； 一群（杰出或著名的人物）

参考例句：

• Quasars are the highly energetic cores of distant galaxies. 类星体是遥远星系的极为活跃的核心体。
• We still don't know how many galaxies there are in the universe. 我们还不知道宇宙中有多少个星系。

3 sifting   

n.筛，过滤v.筛( sift的现在分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审

参考例句：

• He lay on the beach, sifting the sand through his fingers. 他躺在沙滩上用手筛砂子玩。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I was sifting the cinders when she came in. 她进来时，我正在筛煤渣。 来自辞典例句

4 unravel   

v.弄清楚（秘密）；拆开，解开，松开

参考例句：

• He was good with his hands and could unravel a knot or untangle yarn that others wouldn't even attempt.他的手很灵巧，其他人甚至都不敢尝试的一些难解的绳结或缠在一起的纱线，他都能解开。
• This is the attitude that led him to unravel a mystery that long puzzled Chinese historians.正是这种态度使他解决了长期以来使中国历史学家们大惑不解的谜。