An OLD TIME EVENT

Evening Star, Issue 19387, 22 October 1926, Page 2

An OLD TIME EVENT

A ST All TELLS A STORY. Although the ‘ Outlook ’ often refuses to be unduly hurried in reporting the significant events of the week, knowing f-hat most of il£ readers prefer accurate information late to inaccurate information early, it has never before been able to report as legitimate news an *ve,nt that took place 10,01J0,00U years ago. We wish to announce that word of the explosion of a great star, which occurred as long ago as that, has just reached the earth, and has been reported by two astronomers of the university city of Heidelberg. Ten million years ago —the figure is only a rough approximation—a star, probably not unlike our sun, met ■with some catastrophe which caused it to blaze forth within a few hours with thousands of times its ordinary brightness. Its light has thus been steadily travelling across interstellar space ever since the dawn epoch of the age ot mammals. Yet it has just arrived. Such stars are termed new stars, temporary stars, or “ nov;e,” by astronomers. In all forty-five of these intereating objects have been observed in the last three centuries. On© of them, called by the euphonious name Nova Pictorjs. blazed forth brilliantly last year in the skies of the Antipodes. It has often been suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was such a new' star, similar to the phenomenal “ nova.

which, visible in the daytime, alauued Europe in 1572. These new stars have, however, all been without our own galaxy or universe. The one just announced is in another universe. This strengthens the recent conviction that even our vast galaxy, the Milky Way, itself made up of more than a billion suns, has hundreds of thousands of counterparts in other regions of space. A telescope of moderate size reveals the fact that very many of the .stars outside of the Milky Way form really great spiral structures like piu-whcels. These are separate or “island” universes, nearly a million in number, and so inconceivably far from us that their distances expressed in miles mean nothing. When in our January 23, 1924, issue we announced the discovery of an island universe so distant that light required 700,000 years to make the earthward journey, wo felt that the whole of Nature could hardly he expanded more. Yet within a short time astronomers found that the great spiral nebula visible to the naked eye in the constellation. Andromeda was a whole million light-years away from us, while recently Dr Knut Landmark showed that one of the other spiral universes must be fifty-six times as far away as that!

Yet the event which took place in one of these inconceivable remote galaxies 10,000,000 years displays the same general characteristics ns those that occur in our own universe. It shows that the same power governs there that governs hero. Though the rapid expansion of our measures of Nature belittles ns physically _it_ enhances our conviction that the infinite world is under the control of a single infinite law,—jNew York 1 Outlook.