THIS DUSTY UNIVERSE

Evening Star, Issue 22559, 29 January 1937, Page 12

THIS DUSTY UNIVERSE

INCREDIBLY TINY COSMIC PARTICLES Out in the milky way blaze countless stars against a black canopy. Astronomers have detected a faint, pearly glow in the blackness. Dust is the interpretation. There is more in the sky than the stars. Tho telescope is even more revealing. There are dark patches in clouds of stars. “ A hole in the sky ! ” exclaimed the great Herschel, when he first saw one. “ Cosmic dust,” said the late Dr E. E. Barnard. He was right. It is incredibly diaphanous—this dust. In comparison a man’s breath is as thick as the sooty belching of a factory chimney, states the ‘ New York Times.’ A thousand million cubic miles of it weigh only three or four ounces. Yet this mere pinch or two is enough to blot out remote stars and nebulae and hide for ever the hub of our universe —that sim of suns around which the Milky Way revolves. Professor Joel Stebbins Inis made it clear that because of this haze the Milky _ Way is not so large as was thought it was—perhaps only half as large. What is this dust? Probably stuff left over after the Milky Way was formed —stuff like the extra bricks and bits of wood that litter the ground about a lately-finished house. In fact, the obliging mathematicians have shown that it must be so. But there is gas as well as dust in space —a gas which consists of sodium and calcium and which, as the astrophysicists noted some years ago, fluoresces as it is irradiated by nearby suns. Recently Drs Walter S. Adams and Theodore Dunham, of Mount Wilson, announced that besides calcium and sodium there are also titanium and other vapours still unidentified in space. This gas cloud reveals much about the Milky Way. Both cloud and Milky Way spin at different speeds in different concentric zones. From Eddington’s mathematical work it follows that the two masses rub against each other with two possible results. The faster gas cloud tends to fly apart and carry with it the Milky Way, to which it clings. On the other hand, the greater coherence of the Milky Way tends to slow down its own spinning and that of the gas cloud, and to bring about a collapse. If this mathematical reasoning is correct, our universe, meaning' the Milky Way, will end catastrophically either by flying apart or falling together. Astronomers are not worried. It will take a thousand million years for the gas cloud to spin like a solid disc.