LIKE A BURST SHELL.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 288, 2 November 1933, Page 10

LIKE A BURST SHELL.

THE RECEDING UNIVERSE. The universe resembles fragments of a bui-st shell, all apparently receding from each other, Sir James Jeans, the famous physicist and astronomer, told the Birmingham Institute in an address. “I suggest that Bii'mingham is at this moment receding from London, though I think we are all a shade further apart than if the universe were not expanding,” he said. “The distance between London ancl Birmingham is complicated by too many other factors to permit the recession to reveal itself, but telescopes show the recession most clearly elsewhere in the universe. An analysis of light of distant nebulae shows the nebulae i-eceding at a million times the speed of an express train. “Most cosmogonies start on the assumption that the universe originated as a continuous mass of gas filling the whole of space. Theoretical investigations prove that such a mass couldn’t stay spread uniformly throughout space. . , “Gas is condensed round distinct centres; for instance, the compact stars called ‘white dwarfs’ with temperatures of thousands of millions .of degrees | whose substance is so closely packed that many tons occupy less than a 'square inch.”