月球背面有个「耳朵」，专门用来聆听宇宙诞生时的沉默

How a telescope on the far side of the moon could help us see the cosmic dark ages 来源：National Geographic｜作者：Robin George Andrews（英国伦敦，科学记者）｜发布日期：2026 年 6 月 3 日

宇宙大爆炸后 38 万年，有一段没有星光、没有星系的「宇宙黑暗时代」。那里曾飘荡着中性氢气发出的无线电波——极其微弱，却能告诉我们宇宙的基本物理法则是否正确。问题是：地球本身就是一口永不停歇的「电磁噪声锅」，根本听不见。NASA 的工程师们把目光投向了月球背面：那里静得出奇，还有现成的陨石坑可以当天线盘。今年，一台先导实验机将率先降落。如果一切顺利，人类将首次「打开宇宙的一扇新窗户」。

一、原文与参考译文

Millions of years ago, an asteroid crashed into the far side of the moon, the hemisphere always facing away from Earth. In the coming years, a robot might land in the crater it left behind and build a radio telescope fit for the future of astronomy.

That's the premise behind an ambitious project called the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, or LCRT, that aims to turn a moon crater into a telescope using self-assembling robots. The moon blocks out noisy radio interference from Earth, and its far side is littered with craters that could serve as a telescope dish. This makes it an ideal spot to listen for faint radio waves coming from the so-called cosmic dark ages—a mysterious epoch sandwiched between the big bang and the birth of the very first stars.

Being able to hear those ancient radio waves will allow scientists to probe the very nature of reality. "We would know whether our physics is correct, or whether we need to build new physics," says Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and the lead researcher on the LCRT project.

"It opens a new window on the universe—and we don't have many windows left," says Michael Garrett, an astronomer and the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in England. "This is the big one."

From exploding stars to planetary auroras, pretty much everything that produces energy in the cosmos emits radio waves—the same type of wave that your car radio converts into sound. Unlike visible light, these waves are invisible and inaudible to humans. Unfortunately, for astronomers wanting to hear all this, Earth acts like a thundering loud megaphone: Not only does its ionosphere—the electrified layer of the planet's upper atmosphere—make quite the racket, but all our technology can't stop beaming out artificial radio waves.

"It's a horrendous amount of noise," says Anže Slosar, a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. If you're an astronomer hoping to perceive the far-flung cosmos, "it's like looking upward from the bottom of a swimming pool." And there isn't much scientists can do from Earth. "The only way to escape it is to hide from it," he says.

Thankfully, there's a great hiding spot just 240,000 miles away. "For radio astronomy, the moon is one of the best places," says Garrett. If you're on the lunar far side, you're facing away from Earth, and the moon acts as a giant geologic barrier to the planet's cacophony. And if you take measurements at night, it also filters out the sun's own radio interference.

Any radio astronomy conducted on the moon would be welcome. But detecting a signal from "the cosmic dark ages is the long-term goal," says Slosar. Around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of neutral hydrogen gas. That hydrogen would eventually clump together and ignite as the first stars, but back then, there was nothing but darkness.

But raw hydrogen emanates radio waves of a very specific wavelength. This distant signal would be extremely weak, but if scientists could tune into it, they could find out how ordinary matter interacted with enigmatic dark matter—an as-yet undetected 'glue' that binds the universe together—to shape the cosmos we live in today.

There's no guarantee that a telescope on the lunar far side will be able to hear anything: Even with Earth and the sun blocked out, the hum of the Milky Way galaxy itself is still far louder than those hydrogen whispers. But if it does detect those murmurs, our understanding of the universe will change forever. "It's totally uncharted territory," says Garrett.

Scientists have put forward a range of lunar radio telescope ideas. The final form will need to be large enough to "hear" those far-flung radio signals—something the LCRT offers by taking advantage of the moon's chasm-covered topography.

The task of building the telescope would be left to a family of robots: A lander would deliver a concave mesh material made of wires and adorned with reflecting panels to the center of one of the moon's many impact craters. These panels would bounce radio waves from the sky into a receiver that's hanging above the crater floor. Several additional rovers would hoist the wires up to the crater rim and pull them tight, elevating both the mesh and receiver. The crater would shield the telescope from any radio waves not coming from the sky, including any solar radio waves that have managed to skip along the lunar surface.

Bandyopadhyay had some concerns. Relying on several robots to accomplish this task means that, should one malfunction, the telescope would be incomplete. It would also be a somewhat slow process, one that could take the robots through several dangerous night-day cycles that might kill them off.

Bandyopadhyay shared revised designs for the telescope with National Geographic. The LCRT team has reduced its fleet of robots to just one. A solitary droid would land in the middle of a large impact crater—one 4,300 feet across, sufficiently sizable to give the LCRT its expansive form but also not too large to hinder self-assembly—and fire out anchored cables in multiple directions. When their anchors are attached to the crater rim, motors will make them taut, lifting a radio receiver above the lander in the process.

During this deployment, a 1,150-foot-long radio wave reflector designed to concentrate the radio waves coming from the sky onto the receiver will unfurl like a star-shaped flower in bloom. "We took some ideas from origami," says Bandyopadhyay.

First, scientists need to demonstrate that radio astronomy is possible on the moon. That's the purpose of the upcoming Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night, or LuSEE-Night experiment, a collaboration between NASA, the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley.

"No U.S. mission has landed on the far side of the moon. No private company has landed on the far side of the moon," says Slosar. And nobody has listened to cosmic radio signals on the lunar far side.

The biggest menace will be the lunar environment. There is a small risk of a bullet-like micrometeorite fatally wounding the robot. And "the temperature swings are horrendously large," says Slosar, going from hundreds of degrees above zero to hundreds below zero from lunar day to lunar night. LuSEE-Night is equipped with radiators and internal heating mechanisms to try to keep it from freezing or sweltering.

"If we can survive the first night, we can survive many," says Slosar. LuSEE-Night is scheduled to hitch a ride to the moon aboard Firefly Aerospace's commercial lander later this year.

二、核心词汇

阅读原文，把这些词汇放回具体语境：

三、长难句语法拆解

句子一

原句：The moon blocks out noisy radio interference from Earth, and its far side is littered with craters that could serve as a telescope dish, making it an ideal spot to listen for faint radio waves coming from the so-called cosmic dark ages—a mysterious epoch sandwiched between the big bang and the birth of the very first stars.

• 分句一：The moon blocks out noisy radio interference from Earth.
  • 主语：The moon
  • 谓语：blocks out（屏蔽）
  • 宾语：noisy radio interference from Earth
• 分句二：its far side is littered with craters that could serve as a telescope dish, making it an ideal spot...
  • 主语：its far side（月球背面）
  • 谓语：is littered with（遍布着）
  • 宾语：craters（陨石坑）
  • 定语从句：that could serve as a telescope dish — 修饰 craters，说明这些坑可以充当天线盘
  • 现在分词短语：making it an ideal spot to listen for... — 作结果状语，说明「因此使它成为…的理想位置」
  • 不定式：to listen for faint radio waves — 修饰 spot
  • 后置定语（分词短语）：coming from the so-called cosmic dark ages — 修饰 radio waves
  • 破折号后的同位语：a mysterious epoch sandwiched between the big bang and the birth of the very first stars — 解释说明 cosmic dark ages

句子二

原句：If scientists could tune into it, they could find out how ordinary matter interacted with enigmatic dark matter—an as-yet undetected 'glue' that binds the universe together—to shape the cosmos we live in today.

• 条件状语从句：If scientists could tune into it（虚拟语气，表假设）
• 主句：they could find out [how ordinary matter interacted with dark matter ...]
  • 主语：they
  • 谓语：could find out
  • 宾语：how ordinary matter interacted with ... dark matter — 宾语从句，作 find out 的直接宾语
    • 宾语从句内：ordinary matter（普通物质）与 enigmatic dark matter（神秘暗物质）发生 interacted with
  • 破折号内的同位语：an as-yet undetected 'glue' that binds the universe together — 解释 dark matter
    • as-yet 是复合形容词，意为「迄今为止尚未…」
    • 定语从句：that binds the universe together — 修饰 glue
  • 不定式短语：to shape the cosmos we live in today — 作目的/结果状语
    • 关系代词省略的定语从句：we live in today — 修饰 cosmos（原为 the cosmos (that) we live in today）