科学家寻遍千万星球尚未发现生命迹象

A Look at 10 Million Stars Finds No Sign of Life Yet
科学家寻遍千万星球尚未发现生命迹象
Scientists have completed the largest search to date for signs of life outside of our solar system.
科学家们完成了迄今为止在太阳系外的规模最大的搜寻生命迹象的工作。
Using a radio telescope in Australia, scientists studied around 10.3 million stars. They did not find life - not yet, at least.
科学家们利用澳大利亚的射电望远镜研究了大约1030万颗恒星，至少目前为止尚未找到生命迹象。
Researchers were looking for so-called “technosignatures” - communications signals that may come from alien beings.
研究人员也在寻找所谓的“技术信号”——一种或会来自外星生物的通信信号。
Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia, scientists searched for sound waves in the star system of Vela. The findings were published recently in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
科学家们使用西澳大利亚的默奇森宽场阵列望远镜(MWA)在维拉恒星系统中寻找声波。这项发现最近发表于《澳大利亚天文学会出版物》。
Chenoa Tremblay is an astrophysicist with Australia’s national science agency. Tremblay noted that the findings were “not surprising.”
切诺亚·特伦布雷是澳大利亚国家科学局的天体物理学家。特伦布雷指出这一发现“并不令其惊讶”。
“The search for life outside of our solar system is a big challenge,” Tremblay added. “We don’t know when, how, where or what type of signal we may receive to get an indication that we are not alone in the galaxy.”
“寻找太阳系以外的生命本就是一个巨大的挑战，”他补充道，“我们并不知道何时何地何种类型的信号会以何种方式被接收到，告诉我们并非银河系中孤独的生命体。”
The search was 100 times deeper and broader than ever before, noted astrophysicist Steven Tingay of Curtin University in Australia. Still, it involved few stars in the universe.
澳大利亚科廷大学的天体物理学家史蒂芬·廷盖指出，此次搜索是史上最大最深的——比以往要大100倍。尽管如此，它涵盖的恒星也寥寥无几。
“Ten million stars does seem like a lot. However, our best evaluation is that there are around 100 billion stars (in the Milky Way galaxy). So we have only looked at about 0.001% of our galaxy,” Tremblay said. “Pretend the oceans contained only 30 fish and we tried to look for them by testing an area the size of a backyard swimming pool. The chances of finding one of those fish would have been small.”
“千万颗恒星看起来确实很多。然而，据我们估算(在银河系中) 最多大约有1000亿颗恒星。所以这样看来，我们仅搜寻了银河系0.001%的区域。假设海洋中只有30条鱼，而我们试图在后院泳池大小的区域来搜寻它们，那么找到某种鱼的几率会很小。”特伦布雷说道。
Another kind of telescope, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), promises to help search for technosignatures soon.
另一种望远镜，平方公里阵列射电望远镜(SKA)有望很快帮助科学家们寻找技术信号。
“What is important is ... always going deeper and further,” Tingay said. “There is always that chance that the next observation will be the one that turns up something, even if you expect nothing. Science can be surprising, so the important thing is to keep looking.”
廷盖表示：“重点是要一直往远处深处探索。。。。。。我们总是会有机会在下次观察时发现一些东西，即使做好最坏的打算。科学会给你惊喜，所以重要的是要不断寻找。”
I'm John Russell.
约翰·拉塞尔报道。