麻烦大家解释一下这段话：In astronomical units—not perfect, but tantalizingly close. The value for Mars is off by . . . 6 or 7 percent or so. It’s . . . but it’s within 10 percent of the average distance to Mars from the Sun. But I kind of have to skip the one after Mars for now. Then Jupiter’s right there at 5-point something, and then Saturn is about 10 astronomical units from the Sun. Um, well, this pattern is known as Bode’s Law. Um, it isn’t really a scientific law, not in the sense of predicting gravitation mathematically or something, but it’s attempting a pattern in the spacing of the planets, and it was noticed by Bode hundreds of years ago. Well, you can imagine that there was some interest in why the 2.8 spot in the pattern was skipped, and um . . . but there wasn’t anything obvious there, in the early telescopes.

Question

backy · Answer

哈哈，要烦死我们吗？

snowcreature · Answer

This is confusing. It's talking about Bode's Law - which is a pretty obscure topic. It's also has a lot of incomplete sentence fragments, which represent spoken English.

Bode's Law was a hypothesis from the 18th century, which said that the orbits of planets would follow a particular mathematical pattern. (As it turned out, it wasn't a very good prediction...)

It is not easy to summarize the paragraph - so using slightly clearer language, the paragraph would say:

The predictions [from Bode's Law] of the distance of each planet from the sun are not correct, but the predictions are close enough to be interesting. The measure of distance from the sun is in "astronomical units". The predicted distance for Mars is wrong by about 6 or 7 percent. (There was a prediction after Mars, but they aren't going to talk about it for some reason.) Then Jupiter is predicted to be a bit more than 5 astronomical units away from the sun, and Saturn about 10 astronomical units away from the sun. 

This pattern is called Bode's Law. It is not really a law in the scientific sense - but it is an attempt to predict the spacing of the planets. This pattern was noticed by a man named Bode several hundred years ago. 

You can imagine that people were interested in why there was no planet at 2.8 astronomical units from the sun. [The context implies that Bode's law said there should be a planet at 2.8 AU from the sun.] At the time that Bode was alive, the telescopes could not see anything at that distance, so he probably ignored the prediction of a planet at 2.8 AU for that reason.

Sorry for the long answer - hope this helps.