INVISIBLE NEW PLANET.

Colonist, Volume LXII, Issue 15309, 24 February 1920, Page 7

INVISIBLE NEW PLANET.

AN AMERICAN STORY.

Tho New York correspondent of the London "Daily News" wrote in December last:—America's i many mammoth telescopes will shortly search the sky for a supposed new planet with an orbit outside JNeptune which body is deflected by the attraction of some undiscovered material about the size of the earth. If this new planet exists, it is wholly 'invisible to the naked eye, but highly i sensitive photography may disclose a ! moving body amid a dense mass of fixed ytars. This, at any rate, is the hope of the astronomers, who recall a similar situation in 1845, when Adams, of Cambridge, calculated the existence of Neptune in advance of its discovery by Galie, of Berlin. The size of telescopes here is almost incredible. At Pasadena, California, one instrument is 150 ft high, and another 60ft., while the third is still larger ; it has a diameter of 100 m.

This new puzzle of the heavens, if the solution is as suggested, may parallel exactly the case of Neptune's discovery (commented the "Daily News"). it was a disturbance in the motion of Uranus, caused by the attraction of Neptune (then, unknown), that led and Leverrier to calculate Neptune's size and position on the supposition of its existence. And now it is a disturbance in the motion of Neptune that pre-supposes the existence of another newcomer among the planets. But astronomers on this side of the Atlantic are not so optimistic as some in America. Neptune's "year" is so great that it has only been watched along less than a half of its orbit since its discovery, and the perturbations so far observed are too insignificant to justify the hope that their mathematical analysis will lead to tho discovery of a trans-Neptunian planet.