WHEN STARS GROW GOLD.

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6596, 7 May 1925, Page 2

WHEN STARS GROW GOLD.

Scientists have weighed the planets the sun and the moon; we know the distance of stars whose light takes centuries to reach us, and we can even measure accurately the minute amount of heat given by the distant stars. For all that, the sky is still full of puzzles which astronomers are attempting to solve. Take, for instance, the problem of dark stars. Possibly it has never occurred to you that there are such bodies, yet for' every bright star you can see on a clear night there' must be thousands which have gone cold and are-therefore invisible. Yet, dead as they are, they are still plunging through space at appalling speed.’ On February 2nd, 1901, there-Blaz-ed out in the constellation of Perseus a star of amazing brilliance. It was not, of course, a new star. What had really happened was that one of Mdiese dark stars had either hit another, or, perhaps, struck one of the big gas clouds which hang in space. The result was an explosion on a scale we cannot even imagine. «

These dark stars and gas clouds are among the greatest of sky puzzles. It is only three years ago that a Dutch scientist discovered a mystery cloud 140,000,000,000,000 miles in length and twice that distance from the solar system.' It may be gas, it may be dust. We do not know, and probably we never shall.