In July and August of 2016, astronomers noticed something really strange in the data from the Gaia space observatory.
2016年7月和8月，天文学家在盖亚空间天文台的数据中发现了一些非常奇怪的东西。
A distant star oddly brightened, then dimmed.
一颗遥远的星星奇怪地变亮了，然后变暗了。
A few weeks later, it brightened again, and dimmed again.
几个星期后，它又变亮了，又变暗了。
This odd behaviour wasn\'t because of anything the star was doing; rather, the gravity of an invisible object between us and it was warping the fabric of space-time, magnifying the star\'s light as it passed through.
这种奇怪的行为并不是因为恒星所做的任何事情；而是因为我们和它之间的无形物体的引力扭曲了时空的结构，放大了恒星通过时的光线。
Now astronomers have figured out what that invisible object is: a binary star 2,544 light-years away that\'s so dim we can\'t see it at all.
现在天文学家已经弄清楚了这个看不见的物体是什么：一颗距离我们2544光年远的双星，它太暗了，我们根本看不见它。
Yet, based on the way the star\'s gravity magnifies light, astronomers were able to calculate its mass, distance and orbit of the system.
然而，基于恒星的引力放大光的方式，天文学家能够计算出它的质量，距离和系统的轨道。
These techniques, they say, could be a way to locate other hidden massive objects in the Milky Way galaxy - such as the estimated millions of lone stellar mass black holes out there.
他们说，这些技术可能是定位银河系中其他隐藏的大质量物体的一种方法-例如估计那里有数百万个孤独的恒星质量黑洞。
The big clue as to the nature of the system, according to a team of astronomers, was the repeated brightening and dimming of the source object.
根据一组天文学家的说法，关于该系统性质的一大线索是源物体的反复变亮和变暗。
The event has since been named Gaia16aye.
这项活动后来被命名为Gaia16aye。
\"If you have a single lens, caused by a single object, there would be just a small, steady rise in brightness and then there would be a smooth decline as the lens passes in front of the distant source and then moves away,\" said astronomer Łukasz Wyrzykowski from the University of Warsaw in Poland.
波兰华沙大学的天文学家Łukasz Wyrzykowski说：“如果你只有一个镜头，由一个物体引起，那么亮度只会有一个小的，稳定的上升，然后随着镜头经过远处的光源然后移动，就会有一个平稳的下降。”。
\"In this case, not only did the star brightness drop sharply rather than smoothly, but after a couple of weeks it brightened up again, which is very unusual. Over the 500 days of observation, we have seen it brighten up and decline five times.\"
“在这种情况下，不仅恒星亮度急剧下降，而不是平稳地下降，而且几周后它又变亮了，这是非常不寻常的。在500天的观测中，我们已经看到它变亮和下降了五次。”
