Signals from Mars

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 46, 23 February 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

Signals from Mars

DIVERGENT OPINIONS OX THE SUBJECT. 9i?/JjF%&(ff iAj the world is talking rfk V -isf/® nf- the signals which are a^i^^JiiO supposed to be' visible \^y^s|i' °n Mars at the present lkj// ©Ms'&V time. .But when scieu!^LjJsM> tisfs fall out who shall dare to speak? M. Tesh), the well-known electrician, is reported to have said in an interview recently that he believed Mars to be inhabited, and that he was confident the inhabitants were trying to send a message or draw the. attention of the earth to their signals. M. Camillc Flammarion, the great French scientist, on the other hand, declares that the supposed signals are due to perfectly natural causes. "The luminous projections so much talked of," he says, "are nothing new. The same announcement has been made nearly every two years for the last fifteen years, and each time the false interpretations made of them have been refuted." But the public memory is short, and then not everybody reads astronomical ■works even of the most popular kind. What, then, are these luminous projections? I TWO THEORIES. l The planet Mars, like the terrestrial globe, is lit by the sun, which naturally illuminates only one-half at a time. The line of separation of the hemisphere thus lit up from the hemisphere in darkness (the line termed

the "terminator") forms the limit of the phase, as one. can see with the naked eye in the case of the moon. Well, it is there, always there, that we observe these luminous points, that is to say, on the meridian of the rising or the setting- of the sun, and

SOUTH THE BLACK SPOTS ON THE WHITE PORTION REPRESENT LAND, AND AilJj WHERE THE SIGNALS Sl'] 10MRP TO COME FROM.

to explain these flashes scientists offer what is taken as a plausible explanation, namely, that an observer may have seen for more than an hour the clouds lit up by the setting1 sun. Scientists will continue to study Mars | closely.—"Daily Express."