NEWS ABOUT SPACE.

Waikato Times, Volume 100, Issue 16834, 28 June 1926, Page 5

NEWS ABOUT SPACE.

A QREAT DISCOVERY. BY WATCHER OF THE STARS. When explorers set out, from the northern half of the world lo seek the frozen Antarctic, they always have great difficulty near Hie Equator in preserving the life and health of Iheir Eskimo dogs, to which great heal is dangerous. When aviators in balloons, airships. or aeroplanes explore Hie air at great : heights, their greatest enemy is I lie deadly cold. Men have fallen fainting and almost frozen in balloons, and German aeronauls actually did freeze to death in Zeppelins during the war An Astounding Revelation. The temperature of space has always been supposed to represent the absolute, lowest point possible in temperature, the point at which heat Is entirely absent. High mountain peaks are always crowned with snow and ice, and the law is thai temperature decreases one degree Fahrenheit for every 300 feet we climb. All our knowledge, has come from the observations of aeronauts, who can go up a few miles, and from Ihe information brought down, by registering thermometers in toy balloons, whicih can ascend some 30 miles. Bill now comes the astounding revelation that, as the northerner proceeds: through great heat to the cold of the Antarctic, so ascent into the air is made through intolerable cold lo tropical heat I Poor man's Life-Long Labours. The discovery is made known by Professor 11. H. Turner, of Oxford University observatory, who stales that the facts have been worked out by Mr. Dobson, of Oxford, from the results of the almost life-long labours of Mr W. F. Denning, of- Bristol. Mr Denning is a foremost authority on meteors, I and his discoveries in relation to these have extended knowledge . up to 50 miles in space. He shows that the temperature, which falls rapidly 1 as we ascend for (he first few miles, j ceases to fall at about eight miles up. I The atmosphere, he says, becomes j hotter in a certain region of these upper strata.'

This discovery, as slated, was made by Mr Denning, a poor amateur astronomer, an accountant by profession, who has given 00 years of sludy to astronomy, who has discovered five cornels and more than twenty nebulae, who is Ihc author of over a hundred learned papers contributed lo Ihe Transactions of the Royal Astronomical Society, who is yet. at 78, actually a poor man. A man of rami: has defined a "real astronomer" as one who lives nol by science bill for science, and becomes tin astronomer nol for self-advancii-.ment, but only because he cannot help it. Such is .Mr Denning. Such was Flamsteed. England's firs! Aslronomer Royal, who was frightened when j| was proposed lo increase his salary of £lOll a year, lest, such a salary might prove 100 great a. temptation to the greedy. Such was Sir David Gill, who threw away 11500 a year and lived on £3OO ; , year in order to become an astronomer. Such, too, was the great, Sir William Herschel, Willi his incomparable sister Caroline. Playing as a. musician all clay, lie would work at his observations of Hie heavens nearly all night, with Caroline by his side. She helped her brother lo make his lenses, she kept his house, she fed him with a spoon at times during Ihe night when some operalion needed the use of both his hands; she worked out his calculations in the open air till the ink froze, in her pen; and, when this was nol. enough, she would read stories to him to keep him awake. as with weary eyes he scanned the silvery slars. This veteran scholar of Bristol comes, then, into an illustrious succession of servants of science who have had lo practise hard thinking on distressingly plain living. Generally their poverty is not known till the end has come; here we know before P. is 100 late, and may make amends to a great man grown poor in our midst.