首次看到气体星球的核心
The planetary core orbits very close to its parent star
行星核心的轨道非常接近其母恒星
Astronomers have found a previously unseen type of object circling a distant star.
天文学家发现了一种以前看不见的围绕着一颗遥远恒星的天体。
It could be the core of a gas world like Jupiter, offering an unprecedented glimpse inside one of these giant planets.
气体是它的核心，就像木星一样，在这些巨大行星中提供了前所未有的一瞥。
Giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn have a solid planetary core beneath a thick envelope of hydrogen and helium gas.
像木星和土星这样的巨型行星，在厚厚的氢气和氦气包围下，具有坚固的行星核心。
But no-one has previously been able to see what these solid cores are like.
但是以前没有人能够看到这些坚固的核心。
Now, a team of astronomers has discovered what they think are the rocky innards of a giant planet that’s missing its thick atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature.
现在，一组天文学家发现了他们认为的巨大行星内部的岩石，而这颗巨大的行星正在失去其厚厚的大气层。他们的发现发表在《自然》杂志上。
Lead author David Armstrong, from Warwick University, and colleagues had been running a programme to detect exposed planetary cores in data from the Tess space telescope.
来自沃里克大学的首席作者大卫·阿姆斯特朗和他的同事们一直在运行一个程序，从苔丝太空望远镜的数据中检测出暴露在外的行星核心。
“This was one of the candidates we picked out as something to try to observe,” he told BBC News.
他对BBC新闻说：“这是我们挑选出来的一位候选者，作为我们试图观察的对象。”
“We followed it up with an instrument called the Harps spectrograph in Chile, which we used to measure the masses of these candidates. This one came out as being exceptionally massive – much more than we expected really. That’s when we started to look into what could have caused that.”
“我们随后在智利使用了一种叫做竖琴光谱仪的仪器，用来测量这些候选者的质量。这一次被证明是异常巨大的-远远超过我们的预期。就在那时，我们开始调查是什么导致了这种情况。”
When the researchers first looked at the object, they thought it might be a binary star.
当研究人员第一次看到这个物体时，他们认为它可能是一颗双星。
“We kept taking data and it turned out to still be a planet – just an exceptionally massive one for its size,” Dr Armstrong explained.
阿姆斯特朗博士解释说：“我们一直在收集数据，结果发现它仍然是一颗行星，只是它的体积非常巨大。”
Its radius is about three-and-a-half times larger than Earth’s but the planet is around 39 times more massive.
它的半径大约是地球的3.5倍，但它的质量是地球的39倍。
The Tess spacecraft was launched in 2018
苔丝飞船与2018年发射
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