CENTRE OF UNIVERSE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 51, 1 March 1930, Page 9

CENTRE OF UNIVERSE

ASTRONOMICAL THEORY

A GIGANTIC ROTOR

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, sth February. The Boyal Astronomical Society has awardqd its gold medal to Dr. J. S. Plaskett, F. 8.5., Director of the Dominion Astrophysieal Observatory at Victoria, 8.C., and has asked him to deliver tho annual George Darwin lecture in London, in the spring.

Dr. Plaskett's iiowest discovery, for which the award of the Eoyal Society was made, has been translated into unscientific language to mean that every star within the vision of the most powerful telescope, and every other body for billions of miles beyond them, is rotating about a centre inconceivably distant front: ithis earth. The motions of-the speck of ■ matter known as our world are thus said to be far more complicated than.nil usually been supposed, although the theory now established by Dr. Plaskett has been suggested as possible before. First, it is explained, the •world i rotates on its own axis in a motion which !gives us day and night. This .motion is at tho rate of 28,000 miles in twenty-four hours. The world also goes around the sun once a year, providing the ; , change in seasons, this tour being conducted at the rate of eighteen and a half miles a second. Thirdly, the earth moves with tho suu in another circle, this being independent, apparently, of the groat universal movement which Dr. Plaskott has been investigating. Fourthly, as he explains, the earth, the sun, the moon, and every .tiny point of light visible to astronomers is travelling in a circle of almost, unimaginable diameter. Its centre appears to bo in tho direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and is so distant that light from there would take 47,000 years to reach the earth.

Travelling at incredible speed through space, al.l tho heavenly bodies within men's ken are going over distances which it is difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Dr..Plaskett estimates that it requires 300,000,000 years for the visible nniverse to complete its great journey around its distant centre.