Evening Star Newspaper, December 15, 1929, Page 47

Strong Navy Is Held Only Insurance For American Shipping in Time of War *___(Continued From Third Page) Britain equal the allowed Y of the United States. To make such a formula is not easy if it is to take everything into consid- eration. It is as though two garage men in the country agreed to avoid competition by saying that they would have absolutely equal equipment. One, however, says that he prefers Fords for his work, but he has a number of serv- jce stations for his cars around the country. The other says he needs Plerce-Arrows, but he has only the one central service station. Their problem is to work out a formula which will eventually wind up with an agreement that the first man may have, say, 10 Fords to the other man's three Pierce- Arrows. If into this formula be in- jected a factor to take care of the varying ages of the Fords and the Pierce-Arrows as they go on toward deterforation and replacement, the case is almost identical with the problems which confront Great Britain and the United States in their endeavor to de- velop a “yardstick” for cruisers. When this simile is translated into terms of new 10,000-ton cruisers, older smaller cruisers and smaller guns, and various numbers and locations of naval bases, it can be realized how very diffi- cult it will be to evolve a definite for- mula which will evaluate these varying elements so that parity, or even ap- proximate parity, can be reached be- tween two different navies. However, with determined and honest efforts some approximation satisfactory to two nations anxious to reach agreement and approaching the problem with com- mon sense can undoubtedly be reached. From the preceding it will be seen that there are two basic elements which must be understood and appreciated by the people of the country in this ques- tion of cruisers. The first is that if the Navy is to fill its role of war in- surance for our great and increasing foreign trade, it must have cruisers in sufficient numbers to carry out this most important work. The second ele- ment is that in our present position in the world’s affairs the United States has taken the definite stand that we are entitled, in any agreement with regard to navies, to have cruiser strength equal to that of any other nation. If these principles be understood and appreciated by the American people, and the principles put in practice, there need be no fear but that we shall have a Navy e%ual to the problems which it may be called upon to meet and a Navy commensurate with the dignity of our country. Plumbing the Universe (Continued From Third Page.) explanation of another curiosity of the heavens, the globular clusters of stars, and found additional evidence of a vaster universe. This brilliant work at- tracted the motice of astronomers all over the world. With the death of Edward C. Pickering in 1919, the direc- torship of the Harvard College Observa- tory became vacant. After spending months looking over the field the Harvard Corporation offered this post— which is a kind of premiership in American _ astronomy—to _ this young man at Mount Wilson who was then busy exploring the outer fringes of the Milky Way. Experiments in Early Days. “One consideration which made the opportunity very attractive to me.” said Dr. Shapley, “was Harvara's collection of ‘stellar photographs. Away back in the early days of the daguerreotype, as- tronomers here began to experiment with photography. In 1850 Prof. Bond succeeded in_photographing the oright star Vega. The following year he made the first photograph of the moon. When Prof. Pickering became director, in 1876, he continued these experi- ments, and, as photography increased in sensitivity, applied it more and more to astronomy. Here in Cambridge he set up clock-driven telescopes with camera attachments, and made long exposures of selected areas of the sky. In 1889 he established a station in Peru to photograph the southern stars. “Thus for 40 years there has been this continual photographic patrol of the heavens, both north and south of the Equator. The result is an accumu- lation of more than 300,000 negatives. No resources for sounding and ana- 1yzing the universe could be more prom- ising of rich returns than this vol- uminous picture gallery of the stars. And so the quest begun at Princeton and continued at Mount Wilson was transferred to Harvard in 1921, when Dr. Shapley became director of the ob- servatory there. With this incompar- able photographic collection to draw upon as a record of the past, and with eight photographic telescopes working every clear night making additional comparison photographs, the most far- reaching survey ever projected has been organized and is being carried forward, “Four celestial objects, or kinds of objects, constitute the stellar universe as we now know it,” said Dr. Shapley, “and the survey here at Harvard is organized into four researches, each focused on one of these: First, the Milky Way; second, the globular clus- ters, which are outside the Milky Way; third, the Magellanic Clouds, which are more remote; fourth, the outside gal- axies, which are still farther distant from our system. 20,000 Plates to Be Made. “The Milky Way survey alone will re- quire study of 100,000 of the photo- graphic plates now on hand and the making of at least 20,000 new plates of long exposure. Three telescopes in .Cambridge and two in South Africa are in continuous use during clear nights to get these photographs, and six as- tronomers and mathematicians are at work analyzing, computing, reducing and interpreting the results. An inci- dental outcome will be the discovery of hundreds of new stars. We may even double the number of known variable stars, for we are picking the Milky Way to pleces and examining it part by part under the magnifying lass.”” I asked Dr. Shapley to describe some of these “pieces” into which he has dissected our stellar system. “Well, one is the star cloud in which we live,” he answered. “More than half the stars you see with the naked eye are in this local cloud. The cloud, in turn, is composed of many open clusters —such as the Pleiades, which is several bundred stars traveling as a group— and of field stars which travel alone. r sun is a field star. 0“l'our local cloud seems to be travel- ing at present through another cloud. The brightest star in our sky, the dcg star Sirius, is apparently a member of an open cluster which is not of our Jocal system. This cluster is all around us, for in addition to Sirius in the southern sky it includes five of the Blg Dipper stars in the northern sky an many stars between. Curiously, the o end stars of the Big Diper do not belong to the cluster. They are moving in a southerly direction while the clus- ter is moving northerly, and in a few hundred thousand years the Big Dipper Will be distorted out of its familiar pattern.” Our local cloud measures about 5,000 1ight years across. But it is only a small fraction of the Milky Way, for Dr. Shapley's latest researches indicate a galactic diameter of the order of 200,000 light years. When he first an- nounced this dimension most astrono- mers were doubtful. It was too vast a jump, too sudden an expansion, from the conception of a few years ago. But the evidence has continued to pile up, and now there are very few who ques- tion the validity of Shapely’'s measure- ment. The center of the galaxy, as de- termined recently, is in the constella- tion Sagittarius. Dr. Shapley’s second research focuses on the globular clusters. “How are they significant?” I asked. Help Measure Dimensions. “They have proved wonderfully help- ful in measuring the dimensions of our galaxy,” he answered. “It is largely be- cause of evidence from the globula clusters that I set 200,000 light yeats | as the minimum estimate for the galac- tic diameter “The globular clusters are quite dif- ferent from the open clusters found the Milky Way, such as the Pleiades and Hyades. They are larger and more uniform, great globular swarms. Therc are just 93 of them. When we charted their positions we found that while none were within the Milky Way they were relatively near and in fact outline the galactic boundaries. They are evenly distributed, 47 being on one side of the galaxy and 46 on the other Many of these clusters are approaching our system at high velocities, and it is my belief that they pass through at antervals. “It seems to me that we have possibly a key to the process by which our Milky Way has been built up,” continued Dr Shapley. “Every time one of the glob- ular clusters sweeps through our system it is subjected to the enormous gravita- tional pull of the larger mass of the Milky Way. Thus stars are drawn away -grom it, whole clusters may be captured, and it is not improbable that the great open cluster of blue giant stars in Orion is the remnant of a globular cluster which invaded our system trillions of years ago. Perhaps our sun belonged at some time to an outside cluster, and if so it travels now in the larger swarm :1‘( the Milky Way because it is a cap- ve.” “How can you tell the distance of these remote bodies and their direction and velocity of travel?” I asked. “The spectroscope is our great ally in studying velocities and motions. It breaks up starlight into the familiar band of rainbow colors, ranging from violet on one side to red on the other. If the spectrum of a star shows a shift- ing of its lines toward the red side, we know that the star is moving away; if the shifting is toward the violet, we know it is approaching. The amount of this displacement of lines, deter- minded micrometrically, indicates the velocity. “When it comes to measuring dis- tances beyond 5,000 light-years, our most dependable yardstick is a peculiar class of variable stars known as Cepheids. They are called that because the first to be discovered is in the con- stellation Cepheus. We have cata- logued more than 3,000 Cepheids and discovered mapy last year. “Cepheids are peculiar in that the period of variation for each star is an indicator of its real magnitude. Thus a Cepheid which requires 12 hours to change from its maximum brightness through minimum and back to maxi- mum has a real magnitude 100 times that of the sun. One that has a period of 40 days is 10,000 times the sun's magnitude. Astronomer’s Standard Candle. “The Cepheid has become the astron- omer’s standard candle. Whenever he sees one he has only to time its period of variation to determine its distance. “Cepheids are scattered through the Milky Way and have proved of im- mense help in gauging the form and dimensions of our galaxy. ~We have found Cepheids in the globular clusters and in other outside bodies.” ‘The richest mine for the discovery of Cepheids, however, has been the Ma- gellanic Clouds, two great, brilliant patches of stars which rotate around the South Pole and are visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. The third research in Dr. Shapley's program cen- ters on them. “We are interested in the Magellanic Clouds,” he explained, “because they are outside systems, entirely independ- ent of our galaxy, and yet are near enough to be resolved into individual stars and studied in detail. The Ma- gellanic Clouds are about 100,000 light- years distant. They are island uni- verses and are receding from our posi- tion at a velocity exceeding 100 miles a second. “All the different kinds of stars that go to make up our Milkky Way are found in the Magellanic Clouds. They contain both dark and luminous nebu- lae, giant blue stars, red stars and Cepheids, which are yellow giants. “We are building a 60-inch reflecting telescope which we expect to install at ;lv.n.rv:{’tll's ne:vl sutl‘gln irn Bv;\&h Africa. e use mainly for photograph- ing _the Magellanic Clouds.” The fourth line of attack on the mystery of stellar organization and dis- tribution is aimed at the even more distant island universes, the spiral neb- ulae. These differ from the Magellanic Clouds in that they are more uniform in shape, appearing. indeed, like great pinwheels of light, One of these out- side universes can be seen with the naked eye—the great nebula in An- dromeda—but research indicates that it is the largest and nearest, being only 900,000 light-years away. Cepheid va- riable stars have been seen in this nebula, and indubitably fix its distance. It is estimated that there are more than a million of these galaxies, and many of them are many millions of light-vears distant. Boundary Is Great Problem. “One of the great problems” said Dr. Shapley, “is the question of how far space extends. Has the universe a boundary? Before Einstein propounded his theory of relativity we were more prone to think of the universe as limit- less. Exceedingly few astronomers to- day would say that it is. Yet the answer not been proved experimentally— it is all still very much in the air. “But we have this situation: The prin- ciple of relativity has been verified by certain astronomical tests, and we shall never go back to our old ideas of abso- lute space and time. Starting from this general principle, however, there are different forms that cosmogony may take. One form is the universe as de- deducted by the Dutch astronomer De Sitter. He made some brilliant deduc- STOPS all that Pain from Piles! Don’t put up with painful piles another day—or hour. There is positive relief, for thevery worst case. Pyramid sup- positories stop the pain—and { ; even all itch- ing. Pyramid. Remember the name, and you can forget your piles. In other words ess, Just say Pyramid to any druggist; sixty cents. PYP N T O 154-D Pyr: Marshall, Mieh. Piease send me a Pl sealed, postpald, and e Name Address... THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER_ 15, 1929—PART TWO. tions and arri a spherical uniVerse. world remains empty space—and know that space is not empty. “Einstein and Schwarzschild have de- ducted a universe that is cylindrical, but their world demands a universe as full of matter as it can hold—and we know that there is empty space. Neither of at the conception of But De Sitter'’s we these theoretical worlds seems to fit the observed facts. “Astronomers, however, are inclined to hold to De Sitter's conception, even though its author has more or less abandoned it. “Nearly every outside galaxy that we have been able to measure is speedini away from our part of the universe at enormous velocities. Three spirals re- cently photographed at Mount Wilson showed apparent velocities of 3,100 to 4,900 miles a second. We believe that these velocities are not real, but that the bodies are approaching the limit of the universe, where the curvature of | losin space distorts the appearance of motion. There is additional evidence for De Sitter's spherical world.” “Is there any evidence that the uni- verse is running down?" “Our observations tend to show that it is,” answered Dr. Shapley. ‘“The sun is g mass at the rate of 4,000,000 tons a second, and all the other stars are radiating their matter away at rates proportionate to their magnitude. Mil- likan speculates that the energy of ra- diation is translated back into matter. But it is only speculation, not evidence. “When we know how big the universe is, how much matter it contains and how all is organized and distributed, we bl may be able to begin to answer some of these other riddles.” “Of course,” added the astronomer, as the clock called and the interview drew to a close, “the test of all Girioaty aout 1 for. that. o0, 1 pare o this Yestiess Immensity? o Give the Things Which Give the Greatest Joy for the Longest Time A piece of Furniture, a Suite, a Rug—something for the home that every member of the fami s can share—makes the ideal gift. And “Furniture of Merit” insures both character in design and quality in construction, which makes sure of prolonged serv- ¢ ice and satisfaction. Youw'll find our assortments full of the Christmas spirit—with a background of thorough practicability. Of course you know our costless credit is at your convenience. 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