英语翻译---英译汉,求高手帮忙,不甚感激!是《万物简史》中的

英语翻译---英译汉,求高手帮忙,不甚感激!是《万物简史》中的
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 sun-deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Australia, about 80 kilometers west of Sydney, and does an extraordinary thing. He looks deep into the past and finds dying stars.
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 – not the stars 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.
By day, Evans is a kindly and now semi-retired minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, who does a bit of locum work and researches the history of nineteenth-century religious movements. But by night he is, in his unassuming way, a titan of the skied. He hunts supernovae.
A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. ‘It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once,’ says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans – ‘it would wreck the show,’ as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact, most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle. For the month or so that they are visible, all that distinguishes them from the other stars in the sky is that they occupy a point of space that wasn’t filled before. It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky that the Reverend Evans finds.

罗伯特·埃文斯牧师是个说话不多、性格开朗的人,家住澳大利亚的蓝山山脉,在悉尼以西大约80公里的地方.当天空晴朗,月亮不太明亮的时候,他带着一台又笨又大的望远镜来到自家的后阳台,干一件非同寻常的事.他观察遥远的过去,寻找临终的恒星.
　　观察过去当然是其中容易的部分.朝夜空瞥上一眼,你就看到了历史,大量历史--你看到的恒星不是它们现在的状态,而是它们的光射出时的状态.据我们所知,我们忠实的伙伴北极星,实际上也许在去年1 月,或1854年,或14世纪初以后的任何时候就已经熄灭,因为这信息到现在还无法传到这里.我们至多只能说--永远只能说--它在680 年以前的今天还在发光.恒星在不断死亡.罗伯特·埃文斯干得比别人更出色的地方是,他发现了天体举行告别仪式的时刻.
　　白天,埃文斯是澳大利亚统一教会一位和蔼可亲、快要退休的牧师,干点临时工作,研究19世纪的宗教运动史.到了夜间,他悄悄地成为一位天空之神,寻找超新星.
　　当一颗巨大的恒星--一颗比我们的太阳还大的恒星--坍缩的时候,它接着会壮观地爆炸,刹那间释放出1000亿颗太阳的能量,一时之间比自己星系里所有的恒星的亮度加起来还要明亮.于是,一颗超新星诞生了.“这景象犹如突然之间引爆了1 万亿枚氢弹.”埃文斯说.他还说,要是超新星爆炸发生在离我们只有500 光年远的地方,我们就会完蛋--“彻底把锅砸了.”他乐呵呵地说.但是,宇宙是浩瀚的,超新星通常离我们很远很远,不会对我们造成伤害.事实上,大多数远得难以想像,它们的光传到我们这里时不过是淡淡的一闪.有一个月左右的时间,它们可以看得见.它们与天空里别的恒星的惟一不同之处是,它们占领了一点儿以前空无一物的空间.埃文斯在夜间满天星斗的苍穹里寻找的,就是这种很不寻常、非常偶然发生的闪光.
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