CHAPTER 3 THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
If one looks at the sky on a clear, moonless night, the brightest objects one sees are likely to be the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There will also be a very large number of stars, which are just like our own sun but much farther from us. Some of these fixed stars do, in fact, appear to change very slightly their positions relative to each other as earth orbits around the sun: they are not really fixed at all!
This is because they are comparatively near to us. As the earth goes round the sun, we see them from different positions against the background of more distant stars. This is fortunate, because it enables us to measure directly the distance of these stars from us: the nearer they are, the more they appear to move. The nearest star, called Proxima Centauri, is found to be about four light-years away (the light from it takes about four years to reach earth), or about twenty-three million million miles. Most of the other stars that are visible to the naked eye lie within a few hundred light-years of us. Our sun, for comparison, is a mere light-minutes away! The visible stars appear spread all over the night sky, but are particularly concentrated in one band, which we call the Milky Way. As long ago as 1750, some astronomers were suggesting that the appearance of the Milky Way could be explained if most of the visible stars lie in a single disk like configuration, one example of what we now call a spiral galaxy. Only a few decades later, the astronomer Sir William Herschel confirmed this idea by painstakingly cataloging the positions and distances of vast numbers of stars. Even so, the idea gained complete acceptance only early this century.
Milky Way 银河
第三章 膨胀的宇宙
如果在一个清澈的、无月亮的夜晚仰望星空，能看到的最亮的星体最可能是金星、火星、木星和土星这几颗行星，还有巨大数目的类似太阳、但离开我们远得多的恒星。事实上，当地球绕着太阳公转时，某些固定的恒星相互之间的位置确实起了非常微小的变化——它们不是真正固定不动的。
这是因为它们距离我们相对靠近一些。当地球绕着太阳公转时，相对于更远处的恒星的背景，我们从不同的位置观测它们。这是幸运的，因为它使我们能直接测量这些恒星离开我们的距离，它们离我们越近，就显得移动得越多。最近的恒星叫做普罗希马半人马座，它离我们大约4光年那么远（从它发出的光大约花4年才能到达地球），也就是大约23万亿英里的距离。大部分其他可用肉眼看到的恒星离开我们的距离均在几百光年之内。与之相比，我们太阳仅仅在8光分那么远！可见的恒星散布在整个夜空，但是特别集中在一条称为银河的带上。远在公元1750年，就有些天文学家建议，如果大部分可见的恒星处在一个单独的碟状的结构中，则银河的外观可以得到解释。碟状结构的一个例子，便是今天我们叫做螺旋星系的东西。只有在几十年之后，天文学家威廉·赫歇尔爵士才非常精心地对大量的恒星的位置和距离进行编目分类，从而证实了自己的观念。即便如此，这个思想在本世纪初才完全被人们接受。
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