MYSTERIOUS RAYS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20355, 12 March 1928, Page 12

MYSTERIOUS RAYS.

POWER FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE. (From Ouk Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 25. Professor E. A. Millikan and Dr C. H. Cameron, writing in ■ a supplement to “ Nature,” tell the story of the discovery of cosmic rays which it is supposed come from another universe. These extraordinary rays are capable of penetrating 190 ft of water and 16ft of lead before they arc completely absorbed. The rays were first brought to light in 1903 by McLennan and Rutherford. Then, in 1910, a Swiss physicist, Glockol, took au enclosed electroscope in a balloon to a height of 4300 metres, and found that the radiation was higher than at the surface of the earth. In 1921 and 1922 Millikan and Bowen sent up sounding balloons to a height of nearly 10 miles—more than nine-tenths of the way to the top of our atmosphere. In 1923 MilHkcn and Cameron experimented in deep, high-altitude, snow-fed lakes. In 1926 and 1927 they carried out. experiments in Bolivia in the High Andes, in altitudes up to 15,400 ft. FROM THE SPIRAL NEBULAE They see no possible way of assigning the rays to any other than a cosmic origin. Their conclusion is that the rays must come in the main, from beyond the Milky Way—that is, either from the spiral nebula l , if these arc uniformly distributed throughout the heavens, or pise from “ the cloud in space.” They compute that the total energy of the cosmic rays is one-tenth of the total energy coming into the earth’s atmosphere in the form of starlight and heat. They say that it seems quite impossible to limit the source of the rays to the upper tenth of our atmosphere or to any astronomntf.lly near-by regions.