2015-06-03 BBC:星光七纪元-39

 It remains¹ to some extent a theory, but Doug has got as close as anyone to actually seeing it happen.It's started by getting alert on the computer that a supernova had gone off in a very nearby galaxy², only 210 million light years away, here is a picture of the supernova indicated by the arrow, and so what we immediately did was trawl through the Hubble space telescope archives just to see if we could find a picture of that exact spot in the sky taken before the star had actually exploded, and as luck would have it, someone did.

The image revealed that the supernova was the explosion of a star dubbed³ LBV1 in a distant galaxy, Doug and his team realized that they had an unprecedented⁴ opportunity because the star had been a super massive one, at least 50 times the mass of the sun, it was exactly the size to test out the theoretical equations, could this possibly be the birth of a black hole?

Two years we waited for all of the fireworks and embers of the supernova to disappear and go away, so that we could get a third picture, long after the supernova was gone to see if that star in fact had disappeared, and in fact it had, it was now gone, it was an extremely luminous⁵ star, it blew up and now it was gone.

1 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

2 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。

3 dubbed   

v.给…起绰号( dub的过去式和过去分词 )；把…称为；配音；复制

参考例句：

• Mathematics was once dubbed the handmaiden of the sciences. 数学曾一度被视为各门科学的基础。
• Is the movie dubbed or does it have subtitles? 这部电影是配音的还是打字幕的？ 来自《简明英汉词典》

4 unprecedented   

adj.无前例的，新奇的

参考例句：

• The air crash caused an unprecedented number of deaths.这次空难的死亡人数是空前的。
• A flood of this sort is really unprecedented.这样大的洪水真是十年九不遇。

5 luminous   

adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的

参考例句：

• There are luminous knobs on all the doors in my house.我家所有门上都安有夜光把手。
• Most clocks and watches in this shop are in luminous paint.这家商店出售的大多数钟表都涂了发光漆。