NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY TUESDAY, JULY 18, 1933. PLANETARY RIDDLES

Northern Advocate, 18 July 1933, Page 4

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY

TUESDAY, JULY 18, 1933. PLANETARY RIDDLES

Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper.

Dr. V. M. Slipher, director of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, who was recently awarded the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, used the occasion to expound Ids own views on the constitution of the planetary bodies, quite a number of which, including Mars, he holds to be more capable of supporting ‘ ‘some kind of life, ’ ’ plant or animal, than is generally supposed.” To ihe assertion of Sir James Jeans that “there is no definite evidence of life,” the latest commentator replies that “we cannot dogmatise about the conditions necessary for life,'” and that it would be rash to infer for the smaller quantities of oxygen and water vapour f from a twentieth to a twelfth those found on the earth) the impossibility of life in some form on the red planet. Its temperatures, if is surmised, are no more extreme than those of. the. earth, and the absence of vast stretches of water conduces to greater regularity in the duration of the seasons. As a Home paper, referring to thesestatements, says, it is to his discoveries in planetary atmosphere that Dr. Slipher is indebted for his gold medal; and it is these discoveries that, with the aid of infra-red photography, he hopes to carry much farther. Jtipiter is void both of oxygen and water-vapour, but an atmosphere composed of ammonia and met In. ane indicates the presence,, of vegetation; while in. Venus the astronomer has discovered carbon dioxide, the gas which on earth is exhaled by animals and plants, so that Tennyson may have been more correct than he imagined when he described the planet as the “home of all good things.” The two problems which in importance take precedence of others in the minds of astronomers, says Dr. Slipher, are the existence of. life in other spheres and the source of the terrific energy radiated from the stars. As to the genesis of the planets which are required for the sustenance of life, astronomers are now mostly agreed. They have their origin as vast filaments of incandescent matter, drawn from one star through tidal disturbances set up by the close passage of another. So immeasurable is the space in which the stars move, that, though these bodies are multitudinous enough to be likened to midgets in a swarm, it is only rarely that any two attain the required proximity to one another. Once in ten thousand million years is supposed to be as often as this phenomenon occurs. The jets of incandescent matter thus rarely produced, condense into liquid; and then nuclei are formed which in time become planets. Can it be, he asks, that of the planets which sprang from our sun, and are composed of like material, the earth alone is the abode of life?* For holding the contrary opinion, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake; and it is very certain that, had Lord Kelvin lived in the same century, he too would have been burned for suggesting, as a possible reason for the appearance of life on our planet, the arrival of seedbearing meteoric stones, moving about through space, the debris of inhabited worlds. As for the question “whence comes the energy radiated by the stars?”— an energy so stupendous that it is computed that c;ich square inch of our sun emits enough to drive four or five express trains at full speed for millions of years—the savants decline to dogmatise. Helmholtz attributed it to contraction under the attractive force of gravitation; Mayer to continuous bombardment by meteorites. while Jeans has recourse to the electronic, theory of matter, according to which the mutual destruction of positive and negative electrons, through eo*

alesflenep, might resolve the atom into its original form of radiant energy. To supply the sun’s energy, matter would need to be annihilated at the rate of four million-tons a second! The inquirer may, as has been suggested, accept this as perhaps the most plausible of the many suggestions by which it has been, sought to allay the curiosity aroused by the seemingly inexhaustible reservoir from which, the earth and its sister planets draw- their light and heat.