英语听力：自然百科 已知的宇宙：外星生命 Alien_Contact-2

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But for the longest time ,the question was  taboo to science .

 

Before the Mid-1990s ,it was considered somewhat embarassing to even address the question, because looking for alien life seems a little frighteningly close to science fiction .

 

For decades ,the farthest we got in looking for aliens was imagining them on the silver screen .(What is your name?) After all , alien life needs a hull¹, and we havn't even find a planet outside our own solar system .

 

Scientists in fact never talked about planets around other stars. There is no way to detect them. And so it was one of those domains² of science that you couldn't answer and therefore you didn't talk about it.

 

Then in 1995, astronomers³ discovered a planet orbiting a star 50 light-years from earth. And since then they found hundreds more .

 

For the first time, in human history ,we realized that our sun with its 8 major planets that go around it, is just one type of a planetary system ,one example of billlions.

 

These discoveries are exciting ,but don't expect to dial up ET on these planets anytime soon .

 

Well ,it's been a spectacular ride in the last decade to find these planets ,most of them are giant planets.

 

Most of the worlds we found are gas giants which probably couldn't support life .

 

You can't stand on pneumas ,no hard surface,they are large balls of hydrogen and helium gas like Jupiter and Saturn⁴ .

 

We have found a few rocky planets with hard surfaces ,but they are many times more massive than earth ,and contain the most hostile environments you could ever imagine. One such planet, CoRoT-7b,orbits so close to its star that / surface temperatures reach as high as 3000 degrees .Sunlights here does not bring the sound of birds' song ,instead it's an Armageddon of volcanic⁵ explosions .

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