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Watch for falling rocks. Those are words to keep in mind when you're driving a mountain road. Or, it seems, when you're cruising past a white dwarf star.
小心墜落的巖石。如果你在山路上開車，請把這句話記在心上吧。或者可以說在你緩慢駛過一顆白矮星時。
White dwarfs are small, dense remnants of normal stars that have expended their fuel. Now researchers have identified rocky, asteroidlike material raining down on two white dwarfs. The rocky material is akin to the building blocks of planets—and its presence suggests that the two stars formed planetary systems before they expired and became white dwarfs. That's the conclusion of a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
白矮星是普通恒星燃盡后形成的體積很小，質量密集的殘骸。如今，研究人員已經確定了如下雨般落在兩顆白矮星上的多巖石的、類似于小行星的物質。巖石物質類似于行星的構建模塊。它的出現表明兩顆恒星在燃盡變成白矮星前，就形成了行星系。這個研究結論發表在《皇家天文學會月報》上。
Astronomers identified the silicon-rich rocky material by training the Hubble Space Telescope on the nearby Hyades star cluster. Finding rocky material means the stars once had the raw ingredients to make exoplanets—although almost no known planets orbit stars inside of clusters.
天文學家通過培訓哈勃望太空遠鏡觀測附近的畢宿星團來確認富含硅元素的巖石物質。巖石物質的發現意味著恒星內有制造行星的原材料——盡管幾乎沒有已知的行星圍繞星團里的恒星轉動。
The discovery of planetary material thus raises more questions. Are star clusters indeed inhospitable to planets? Or are planets around stars in clusters for some reason just harder to spot? In the Hyades cluster, at least, it looks like there may be planets that have so far escaped our notice.
行星物質發現也因此產生了許多問題。星團確實不適合行星嗎？還是說出于某種原因，圍繞星團的行星很難被發現？至少在畢宿星團，看起來似乎有行星逃離了我們的關注的目光。
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