"MILLIONS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 189, 12 August 1933, Page 9 (Supplement)

"MILLIONS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS."

Astonishing is it to learn, from Sir James Jeans' book, "Tho New Background of Science," that, apparently, the universe ia expanding. Nebulae whoso light takes a million years to reach us are receding (in round numbers) 100 miles a second; nebulae at twice this distance at double this speed, and so on. Nebulae Whose distance is estimated to be 135 times as great as this—so that their light takes 135 million years to reach us—have just been found to be receding from lis at the colossal speed of 15,000 miles a secondAre these speeds real or due to faulty observation ? If they are real, the universe must be changing very rapidly; it is doubling its dimensions every 1300 million years or so. If we assume that the speeds have always been as at present, atid trace the motion back for 2000 million years, we find the whole universe concentrated in a quite small region of space. The theory of the expanding universe suggests that the universe cannot have been performing these evolutions for much more than 100,000 million years, anil so brings us up against a new difficulty. The time needed for the universe to attain its present stage of evolution can be estimated in a. great number of ways, and all'agree in indicating a period of millions of millions of years.