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. (1)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.)

(2)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. (3)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.

(4)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. (5)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.

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1．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。
2．巨大的宇宙云的存在，实际上是使20年代首创的大爆炸论得以保持其宇宙起源的主导地位所不可缺少的。
3．天体物理学家使用南极陆基探测器及球载仪器，正越来越近地观测这些云系，也许不久会报告他们的观测结果。
4．假如那些小热点看上去同预计的一致，那意味着又一科学论说的胜利，这种论说即更完美的大爆炸论，亦称宇宙膨胀说。
5．宇宙膨胀说虽然听似奇特，但它是基本粒子物理学中的一些公认的理论在科学上看来可信的推论。许多天体学家七、八年来一直公认这一论说是正确的。

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