SECTION III Time 35 minutes 28 Questions
Directions: Each passage in this section is followed by a group of questions to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. For some of the questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer, that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question, and blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.
Until recently many astronomers believed that asteroids travel about the solar system unaccompanied by satellites. These astronomers assumed this because they considered asteroid-satellite systems inherently unstable. Theoreticians could have told them otherwise: even minuscule bodies in the solar system can theoretically have satellites, as long as everything is in proper scale. If a bowling ball were orbiting about the Sun in the asteroid belt, it could have a pebble orbiting it as far away as a few hundred radii (or about 50 meters) without losing the pebble to the Sun’s gravitational pull.
Observations now suggest that asteroid satellites may exists not only in theory but also in reality. Several astronomers have noticed, while watching asteroids pass briefly in front of stars, that something besides the known asteroid sometimes blocks out the star as well. Is that something a satellite?
The most convincing such report concerns the asteroid Herculina, which was due to pass in front of a star in 1978. Astronomers waiting for the predicted event found not just one occultation, or eclipse, of the star, but two distinct drops in brightness. One was the predicted occultation, exactly on time. The other, lasting about five seconds, preceded the predicted event by about two minutes. The presence of a secondary body near Herculina thus seemed strongly indicated. To cause the secondary occultation, an unseen satellite would have to be about 45 kilometers in diameter, a quarter of the size of Herculina, and at a distance of 990 kilometers from the asteroid at the time. These values are within theoretical bounds, and such an asteroid-satellite pair could be stable.
With the Herculina event, apparent secondary occultations became “respectable”—and more commonly reported. In fact, so common did reports of secondary events become that they are now simply too numerous for all of them to be accurate. Even if every asteroid has as many satellites as can be fitted around it without an undue number of collisions, only one in every hundred primary occultations would be accompanied by a secondary event (one in every thousand if asteroid satellites system resembled those of the planets).
Yet even astronomers who find the case for asteroid satellites unconvincing at present say they would change their minds if a photoelectric record were made of a well-behaved secondary event. By “well-behaved” they mean that during occultation the observed brightness must drop sharply as the star winks out and must rise sharply as it reappears from behind the obstructing object, but the brightness during the secondary occultation must drop to that of the asteroid, no higher and no lower. This would make it extremely unlikely that an airplane or a glitch in the instruments was masquerading as an occulting body.英语作文
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