Evening Star Newspaper, July 14, 1929, Page 84

THE. SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JULY 14, 192—PART 7. e — N e ea—————— 3 0l BY JAMES STOKLEY. LASHES of light in tranquil Sum- mer skies. . . . “A shooting star,” you say. A meteor, dead fragment of a star has burned itself out in the earth’s atmosphere, like a spark ti EE il 15 BEgt 1 =i gik E I i g 1§ : E ; £s ) : 5 g i 5 be tirely buried However, . J. Luyten, stationed at the Harvard rvatory’s South African I?ranch. has estimated it at 50 tons. gRgl In the American Museums of Natural His- tory, in New York City, is the famous Ahnighito - meteorite, which weighs 36'; tons. Until the dlwoverymSouthAffléchlsmthemt meteorite known. A 30 e X o In a museum in Stockholm is another -huge meteorite. It was discoversd in Greenland in 1870 by the Swedish explorer A. E. Norden- " skiold. It weighs 21 tons. BU’I’ even these huge stones are small com- pared to two other famous falls. On June 30, 1908, at 7 o'clock in the morning in the “falling star,” was seen to land. Though this is & comparatively sparsely settled reciop_‘ol the globe, thousands of people saw it~ ‘st more_heard the thunderous roar that accom- panied its passage and the sound waves were recorded on phs at the towns of Kirensk and Irkutsk. - At Irkutsk, also, & seismograph, used for recording earthquakes, registered the But even the Siberian meteorite is probably smaller than the famous one that caused the meteor crater in Arizona. Nobody knows when this- fell—perhaps it- was thousands of years sgo. It formed a great crater, four-fifths of a mile across the top and about 450 feet deep below the surrounding plains. Piled up around the outside is a rim of quartz and rock fragments so that it has an inside height of about 570 feet. A company has been formed, and is now at work, trying to locate the mass of iron of the meteor itself. . America’s largest known $hooting star By lemy lanivnt dppe g ing Secrets of Shooting Stars A messagé from space. Large meteorites on display in the National Museum. Scientists Now Have Concluded That These Heavenly Messengers, Some Capable of Wiping Out Whole Cities, Give Evidence There Are Other Solar Systems and That Possibly There Are Other Inhabited Planets. 80 the scientist does not worry what damage meteorites might do. Instead, he devotes his time to studying them, finding what they are made of, and learning their significance in the scheme of the universe. At the University of Pennsylvania is one of the meteor authorities of the world, Prof. Charles P. Olivier, au of the standard work in English on the subject of meteors. Re- before ihe Pranklin Institute in Philadelphia and told of his latest conclu- sions on ject of shooting stars. Per- haps the most striking of these is that the scar. Luckily, the untold tons of stellar scrap iron that formed it fell on Arizona weaste land and not in the heart of a city. ——tnapoin Vileial b W UR TP, Yivsg & i AL BT SN VY o T o are messengers to earth from other stellar sys- tems carrying the assurance that our sun and its attendant planets are not alone among such systems in the heavens. Coming as unexpectedly as they do, exact determination of the way a meteor is moving is seldom possible. But under Prof. Olivier's direction there has been formed a very active group of amateur scientists, known as the American Meteor Society. Its members watch particularly for the shooting stars, and re- port them to him—a valuable scientific service. Prom a large number of such observations of the paths they take it is possible to calculate just the way they are moving and their speed. Such work as this has shown that most of the meteors are moving in the curve known as a hyperbola, If you cut a slice out of a cone, you get one of three kinds of curves, all of which are grouped together under the general name of “comic sections.” If you cut nearly perpen= dicular to the axis you get an ellipse. If the cut is parallel to the side the curve is a para- bola, while if it is away from the side the result is a hyperbola. All of the heavenly bodies that belong to or enter our solar system move in one of these three curves. The planets themselves move in ellipses; so do most of the known comets. A few comets move in parabolas, but it turns out that most of ihe meteors are moving in hyperbolas. This latter fact is more than a curious bit of information, for only bodies originating in our own solar system can move in ellipses. Motion in a hyperbola proves that the body entered the solar system from outer space, and‘'so we have evidence that the meteors are really visl- tors from some other part of the universe. But not all meteors are such visitors. Many of them, especially those of the great showers, such as the ones that occur in November and August, do move in elliptical paths. This shows that they are natives of the solar sys- tem and have been born in a way similar to the birth of the earth itself. 3 ASIDI from their motion, the strange me- teors and those of our own family are the same. And this brings us to th: conclu- sion, as Prof. Olivier expresses it: “That planets also, not unlike our own, circulate about other stars as well as these meteorites, which alone, with an occasional comet, can escape from gelr original home and bring this message us.” S0 here is evidence, for the first time in astronomical history, that our solar system is not alone in creation. In a few months the star Capella will appear in the constellation of Auriga, the charioteer, in the northeastern sky. This is a yellow star, the spectroscope shows it to be similar in composition to the sun. Perhaps surrounding Capella is a retinue of planets. Presumably on one of these planets conditions would be similar to what they are on the planets of our own system. It is conceivable that these planets might also be inhabited, but the astronomer who now has the first meager evidence that there are other solar systems hesitat>s to express an opinion, The study of meteors has an interesting history beginning with veneration, passing through a stage of skeptical disbelief and finally reaching the present scientific attitude toward them. The earliest records are of meteors falling . in China in the years 687 and 644 BC. Dur- ing the following six centuries these annals record 14 others. Various classical writers mention them and that they were supposed to be sacred. In more recent years they fell in cther parts of the world and also were regarded as holy objects. However, the oldest known meteorite whose fall is actually recorded, dates from 1492, s0 that year has something to be famous for besides Columbus' discovery of America. “Our very term ‘meteorology’ proves that for & long time they were considered to be merely Continued on Fifth Pane fu ‘s e wpanieir POl Vet