AN OLD TIME EVENT

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3717, 2 November 1926, Page 2

AN OLD TIME EVENT

A STAR TELLS A STORY. Although the ‘ Outlook ’ often refuses to he unduly hurried in reporting the significant events of the week, knowing that most of its readers prefer accurate information late to inaccurate ini urination early, it has never before been able to report as legitimate news an event that took place 10,1)00.000 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 uni\ersily 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 ol_ the age of mammals. Yet it has just arrived. Such stars are termed new stars, temporary stars, or “ nova 1 ,” by astronomers.* In all forty-five of those interesting objects have been observed in the last three centuries. One of them, called bv the euphonious name Nova Pictoris.* blitzed 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, alarmed Europe*in 1572. These new stars have, however, all been without our own galaxy or universe. The one just announced is in another universe. Tins strengthens the recent conviction that even our vast galaxy, the Milky May, itself made up of more than a billion suns, lias 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 pin-wheels. 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 25, 1924, issue we announced the discovery of an island universe so distant that light required 700,000 years to make the earthward journey, we felt that the whole of Nature could hardly bo 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 ago displays flic same general characteristics as those that occur in our own universe. It shows that the same power governs there that governs here. Though the rapid expansion ot our measures of Nature belittles us physically it enhances our conviction that the infinite world is under the control ot a single infinite law.—New York ‘Outlook.’