PLANET JUPITER.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17570, 8 March 1929, Page 7

PLANET JUPITER.

ASTRONOMERS PUZZLED

RECENT DISTURBANCES

Astronomers are iu a dilemma about Jupiter. Until recently it was supposed that Jupiter, which is the giant of the heavens, was in a semi-sun condition —not sufficiently hot ho shine by its own light, but having great internal heat, which might produce the puzzling disturbances —seen by the astronomers as black spots—observed in the last two months. This, view has been shaken by two discoveries. Not only have the recent radiometric observations ■by means of a delicate instrument shown that the temperature of t the surface of Jupiter is about 100 degrees Centigrade below zero, but Dr. Harold Jeffreys, F.R.S., has made some calculations which confirm the results obtained with the thermometer device. If, then, Jupiter is cold', whence comes th© energy which alone can explain the tremendous disturbances which the Rev. T. E. R. Phillips, the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, has observed since mid-Aug : ust last year? That, Mr. Phillips told a Daily News reporter who visited his observatory at Headley, near Epsom, is the problem the astronomers are trying tto solve—Dr. Jeffreys by mathematical calculations, Drs. Coblentz and Lampland, in America, by radiometric work, and he himself by nightly telescopio observations.

These Mr. Phillips has been carrying out for 30 years and never before has he witnessed such extraordinary disturbances on the planet as at the present. Hitherto the belt in which the red spot occurs has been clear,( hut since August the belt has been filling up with, black spots or disturbances until it has become in a state of turmoil. Mr. Phillips is hopeful that the two apparently conflicting theories about tjlie temperature of Jupiter can be reconciled, and the problem of the present disturbances solved. “There is no doubt about the tremendous energy being there to cause .the disturbances,” he said. “The problem is an absorbing one.” -