1998年考研翻译英译汉试题
They were, by far, the largest and most distant objects that scientists had ever detected: a strip of enormous cosmic clouds some 15 billion light-years from earth. (71)But even more important, it was the farthest that scientists had been able to look into the past, for what they were seeing were the patterns and structures that existed 15 billion years ago. That was just about the moment that the universe was born. What the researchers found was at once both amazing and expected; the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite—Cobe—had discovered landmark evidence that the universe did in fact begin with the primeval explosion that has become known as the Big Bang (the theory that the universe originated in an explosion from a single mass of energy.)
(72)The existence of the giant clouds was virtually required for the Big Bang, first put forward in the 1920s, to maintain its reign as the dominant explanation of the cosmos. According to the theory, the universe burst into being as a submicroscopic, unimaginable dense knot of pure energy that flew outward in all directions, emitting radiation as it went, condensing into particles and then into atoms of gas. Over billions of years, the gas was compressed by gravity into galaxies, stars, plants and eventully, even humans.
Cobe is designed to see just the biggest structures, but astronomers would like to see much smaller hot spots as well, the seeds of local objects like clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They shouldn't have long to wait. (73)Astrophysicists working with ground-based detectors at the South Pole and balloon-borne instruments are closing in on such structures, and may report their findings soon.
(74)If the small hot spots look as expected, that will be a triumph for yet another scientific idea, a refinement of the Big Bang called the inflationary universe theory.Inflation says that very early on, the universe expanded in size by more than a trillion trillion trillion trillionfold in much less than a second, propelled by a sort of antigravity. (75)Odd though it sounds, cosmic inflation is a scientifically plausible consequence of some respected ideas in elementary-particle physics, and many astrophysicists have been convinced for the better part of a decade that it is true.
1998年考研翻译英译汉语参考译文（全文翻译）
它们是科学家们迄今发现的最最大、最最遥远的物体：一块狭长的、巨大的宇宙云系，离地球大约150亿光年。71）但更为重要的是，这是科学家们所能观测到的最遥远的过去的景象，因为他们看到的是150亿年前宇宙云的形状和结构。那正好大约就是宇宙形成的时候。研究人员的发现既令人吃惊又不出人意料，因为美国国家航空航天局的宇宙背景探索卫星（简称Cobe）已经发现了划时代的证据，证明宇宙事实上的确起源于远古的一次爆炸，这就是著名的大爆炸论（此理论认为宇宙起源于一块巨大能量的爆炸）。
72）巨大的宇宙云的存在，实际上是使二十年代首创的大爆炸论得以保持其宇宙起源论的主导地位所必不可少的。根据这一理论，宇宙形成的时候是一团亚微观、极其稠密、朝四周扩散的纯能量，这块能量在扩散的同时还释放出辐射线、农缩成粒子、然后形成气体原子。数十亿年来，这种气体受引力的压缩形成了星系、恒星、行星并最终甚至造就了人类。
