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3 THE REVEREND EVANS'S UNIVERSE
3.埃文斯牧師的宇宙
When the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Australia, about fifty miles west of Sydney, and does an extraordinary thing. He looks deep into the past and finds dying stars.
羅伯特·埃文斯牧師是個說話不多、性格開朗的人，家住澳大利亞的藍山山脈，在悉尼以西大約80公里的地方。當(dāng)天空晴朗，月亮不太明亮的時候，他帶著一臺又笨又大的望遠鏡來到自家的后陽臺，干一件非同尋常的事。他觀察遙遠的過去，尋找臨終的恒星。
Looking into the past is of course the easy part. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it—the stars not as they are now but as they were when their light left them. For all we know, the North Star, our faithful companion, might actually have burned out last January or in 1854 or at any time since the early fourteenth century and news of it just hasn't reached us yet. The best we can say—can ever say—is that it was still burning on this date 680 years ago. Stars die all the time. What Bob Evans does better than anyone else who has ever tried is spot these moments of celestial farewell.
觀察過去當(dāng)然是其中容易的部分。朝夜空瞥上一眼，你就看到了歷史，大量歷史--你看到的恒星不是它們現(xiàn)在的狀態(tài)，而是它們的光射出時的狀態(tài)。據(jù)我們所知，我們忠實的伙伴北極星，實際上也許在去年1月，或1854年，或14世紀初以后的任何時候就已經(jīng)熄滅，因為這信息到現(xiàn)在還無法傳到這里。我們至多只能說--永遠只能說--它在680年以前的今天還在發(fā)光。恒星在不斷死亡。羅伯特·埃文斯干得比別人更出色的地方是，他發(fā)現(xiàn)了天體舉行告別儀式的時刻。
By day, Evans is a kindly and now semiretired minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, who does a bit of freelance work and researches the history of nineteenth-century religious movements. But by night he is, in his unassuming way, a titan of the skies. He hunts supernovae.
白天，埃文斯是澳大利亞統(tǒng)一教會一位和藹可親、快要退休的牧師，干點臨時工作，研究19世紀的宗教運動史。到了夜間，他悄悄地成為一位天空之神，尋找超新星。
