Though a mission to the asteroids may lack the glamour of sending probes to Mars and themoons of Saturn,
尽管小行星探测任务不如将探测器送入火星和土星那样令人瞩目,
these tiny planetlets have long fascinated astronomers, for they offer a window on theearliest years of the solar system.
但这些微小星体一直令天文学家们着迷,因为它们能为我们揭开太阳系形成初期之谜。
When the sun formed, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was surrounded by a disk of gas anddust.
约45亿年前,太阳形成之时曾被大量的气体和尘埃盘包围。
During the next few million years, lumps of that disk stuck together to form the familiar eightplanets of the modern solar system.
在后续的几百万年间,这些盘状物质块相互结合形成了现代为人熟知的太阳系八大行星。
Some lumps, however, were left over. And a lot of them are concentrated in the asteroidbelt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter,
但还是有些物质块被遗留下来。它们大部分集中于火星和木星轨道之间的小行星带内,
where the combined gravities of Jupiter and Saturn seem to have gathered them from otherparts of the solar system.
木星和土星的组合引力似乎将它们集聚起来并与太阳系的其它部分分离。
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