WHAT IS IN THE SUN?

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 17, 21 January 1933, Page 8

WHAT IS IN THE SUN?

When ho delivered the first Arthur lecture before the Smithsonian Institution Professor Henry Norris Russell, of Princeton, made' it clear what an immense debt astro-physicists owe to the spectroscope. Only ill the middle of the last century Auguste CoMte, famous philosopher, doubted if the time would ever come Wllen men w tin Id kriOvV the Composition of the suit: NoW Professor Russell assures u3 that six sodium,,magnesium, silicoh, potassium, calcium and il'Oh—furnish 05 per 1 cetit by weight of iill the metallic vapoum, alld slk more elements tenths of the remainder. On the whole, the Relative abundance of metals, both base and precious, is abbut the same iii the sun as on the earth. We are impressed to learn that there must be 500,000,006 tohs of platinum above the photosphere—the glowtiig atmosphere of the Sun, the £Un that we see. But Professor Russell reins in our imagination by telling us that 'this amounts to less than eight ounces per square mile of surface, or oiie-eightli of an ounce per acre. An equal amount rained down in dust on the earth's surface would not be worth the labour of sweeping up." Still, the sun is different from the earth in chemical composition. At least 90 per cent of all the atoms in the solar atmosphere fixe atbfils of hydrogen. Of the remainder, helium and oxygen .contribute some two-thirds, and all the metals, together with carbon, sulphur, etc., the rest.