EARTH LAGGING BEHIND IN A FAST UNIVERSE

Taranaki Daily News, 19 January 1935, Page 15 (Supplement)

EARTH LAGGING BEHIND IN A FAST UNIVERSE

But Our “Backwater" Is Pretty

Large Amount Of Space!

T>OOR old Mother Earth, our sun, and the lovely Milky Way receive rough treatment at the hands of modern astronomers. They are described as “stick-in-the-muds,” lagging behind in a backwater of space, while the rest of the universe is expanding like a soap bubble. Describing the latest astronomical discoveries, Professor Harlow Shapley, the famous Director of Harvard Observatory, told his audience at Cleveland that astronomers are daily receiving more evidence that the universe is expanding at a speed of 24,000 miles a second. But this expansion does not apply to all the universe, parts of which are contracting. Others are just stagnant. The “backwater,” in which the earth, the sun, and the Milky Way are “stuck” is a pretty big amount of space. Light travels at 186,000 miles, a second, and it takes a ray of light 1,000,000 years at this speed to cross it. In other regions the universe is collapsing—that is, getting denser. The most-talked-of star in the universe to-day, said Professor Shapley, is Zeta Aurigae, a double star with a 30-days eclipse, compared with the few minutes when our sun is hidden by the moon. “During the past few months,” said

the professor, “this star has had more powerful machinery turned on its eclipse antics than ever before in its history or ours.” The first eclipse observed ended on October 30. One of the twins is a giant red star and the othei' blue, and about every two half-years the red star blots out the blue.

Professor Shapley is looking forward eagerly to the completion qf a new giant 200-inch telescope which, he says, will permit the exploration of the heavens to reveal 2,000,000,000 island universes.

The Harvard Observatory has been adding thousands of new galaxies to the astronomical map, and the present total is more than 125,000. A

third of he heavens has been surveyed, and Professor Shapley foresees a total of 300,000 galaxies being discovered. The brain reels when we learn that the average galaxy contains up to 30,000,000,000 suns. Professor Shapley showed his audience an amazing film of a “solar bomb” or a mass of hydrogen gas thrown out from a sun spot. It was 40,000 miles long, had an area of 800,000,000 square miles, and travelled at 504,000 miles an hour. The professor suggested that the universe began expanding 5,000,000,000 years ago. There are limits to the penetration of space, he pointed out, no matter what telescopes may be invented in future. In outer space nebulae are travelling faster than light travels towards the earth.