Evening Star Newspaper, September 21, 1930, Page 83

Fiction B;—c-)—l—(s PART " 7. The Sundoy Star Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, SEPTEMBER 21, 1930. Features Puzzles 24 PAGES. Star Stuff e»d Empire Explorers, Spying Into Space, Find a Thousand Stars—but Who Has the Title to 1 hese Vast Dominions ¢ S findings keepings? Does the fact of ~sighting & new land confer title to ownership, or is it necessary to colonize a country in order to establish terri- : torial rights in it? These alternatives .will doubtless be a subject for lively interna- tional discussion within the next few months. My prediction is that findings will win over settlings. The problem of colonizing Antarctica is too complicated and theoretical a procedure at present to be embarked upon by any nation. But if discovery confers terrestrial rights, what shall be said of celestial land-falls? Surely the imperialists need not hang all their hopes on the poplar continént, where the claims are tangled and the claimants numerous. Do our ‘empire builders know that while Byrd was dis- covering the Rockefeller Range another group of explorers spying into space from Massa- chusetts were completing their discovery of 1,000 stars, each vaster than the sun, each at- tended, it may be, by unseen planets and satel- lites? Here, indeed, are new dominions. And they are but a beginning in the immeasurable empire of American astronomical discovery. Since 1925 Dr. Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory has been leading this 10- year expedition into interstellar and inter- galactic space. His exploration has required a searching of tens of thousands of photographic plates of the northern and southern skies, and among the fruits of this fine-tooth combing of the star fields are these 1,000 hitherto uncata- logued worlds—novae, Cepheids and other pe- culiar variables. NE of Dr. Shapley's lieutenants, Miss Hen- rietta Swope—whom a Boston newspaper described as “a little slip of a girl”"—herself has discovered 400 variable stars. And in all the universe only about 7,000 of these sfrange blink- ing orbs are known! Another lieutenant, Miss Adelaide Ames, has the identification of 3,000 spiral nebulae to her credit. These young star hunters are but following in the steps of an- other woman pioneer, the late Miss Henrietta Leavitt, who, searching the two Magellanic Cilouds which hover over the Southern Hemi- sphere like wisps of celestial snow fields, found 1,777 variable stars. We know now that these two star clouds are outside galaxies nearly a hundred thousand light years distant. Thus, this gentle lady’s discoveries carry us outside our own Milkky Way and set up a claim and plant the flag in a far off foreign universe. Both at Harvard and at Mount Wilson re- eent explorations outdistance the Magellanic Clouds and reveal domains as far off as 169,- 000,000 lighy.years. To realize how far our sky explorers have pushed in five years one has only to recall that in 1925 Jeans mentioned 1,000,000 light years as the distance to the most remote object then known. In the abysmal spaces between the constel- lations Virgo and Coma Bernices the astron- omers recently identified great whorls outside the Milky Way pinwheel in which our sun is one point of light—each whorl a galaxy, a con- course of suns, a universe in its own right. On one Harvard photograph I saw a thousand of hese fuzzy pinpricks—and the astronomers esti- mate that for even the nearest the light traveled 100,000,000 years to imprison itself in the picture. ¥ Perhaps the most amazing of the late dis- coveries is that which gives evidence of the organization of certain galaxies into a federated system. In one field Dr. Shapley found 300 of these bodies in symmetrical arrangement and apparently moving around a common center of revolution—a supergalaxy which in its aggre- gate far outranks our home galaxy in size. But these realms are inconceivably remote. Their magnitude and their time-scale over- whelm our comprehension. To grasp them is a project- for eternity. Are there no finds closer home? One of our near neighbors is Sirius, the Dog Star of our Winter nights. Sirius is so bright and so conveniently placed that optical ex- perts use it as a favorite point at which to sight and test the definition of new lenses. Some years ago the telescope makers, the Messrs. Alvan Clark, senior and junior, com- pleted an 18-inch lens for the Dearborn Ob- servatory and set the glass in a temporary mounting in the factory yard at Cambridge, Mass. The elder Clark wished to try it on the Dog Star, but the mechanism stuck, and after several unsuccessful attempts he called to his son, “Here, see if you can get the confounded thing on Sirius.” THE younger Clark took hold, soon got the star, focused carefully and for a few moments observed in silence. Then he quietly announced one of the really big discoveries. “PFather, Sirius is a double star.” The elder Clark, who was as quick and impulsive as his son was deliberate and reserved, clapped his eye to the eyepiece. There he saw the brilliant Sirius and close beside it a smaller and fainter companion, “The old gentleman never quite forgave me. He would have made the discovery himself if he had only pointed the big tube straight,” re- lated Alvan Clark, jr., to the man from whom I have this account of the accidental dis- covery—the Right Rev. John P. Sullivan of Central Falls, R. 1. Others weighed the new-found star and its mass turned out to be four-fifths of the sun’s mass. But its brightness registered only 1-360th of the sun’s brightness at the same distance. Apparently here was a star only red hot. It was so catalogued in the star atlases—not ex- . actly a dark companion, but a dim one. Then Dr. Walter 8. Adams turned the 100- inch mirror of the Mount Wilson telescope on the companion of Sirius. He soon saw that, far from being merely a red star, it was white hot. It appeared dim because of its small size, but area for area it was brighter than the sun. When his observations were reduced it was found that the companion—would it be egotism to call it the American Sirius?—was not much larger than a good-sized planet. Those who had been calling our sun a dwarf star were confronted with a dwarf indeed. They were confronted, too, with an enigma. Squeeze four-fifths of the sun into a globe that has a diameter only one thirty-third that of the sun, and what have we? Matter 50,000 times as dense 'as water. On our terrestrial scale of weights and measures it would average a ton to the cubic inch. But this seemed nonsense. A star is gas- eous, and how a substance could be thousands - of times the density of the hardest solid metal and yet remain a gas was difficult to under- stand. Dr. Adams attacked the density deter- mination on a different basis, and again the result was the same. Meanwhile, confirmation came from a new source. Dr. E. E. Barnard, searching the ckies from Yerkes Observatory, discovered a second white dwarf. Here again the star weighers found star stuff of such massivity that they could no longer regard the density of our sun (1% t'‘mes that of water) as the limit for A gaseous body. > MOR!: recently another Mount Wilson ob- server, Dr. Adriaan van Maanen, has dis- covered a third white dwarf. It is swmaller than the earth, and when its mass was worked out Van Maanen’s star proved to be 400,000 times the density of water—more than seven tons to the cubic inch! How can so much exist in so little? Dr. van Maanen himself outlined an explanation in a recent contribution to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific: « +« « “The physicists have told us that the density of an electron is about 30 times that of water, while that of the proton is enor- mously higher still. If, therefore, we could Is It Necessary to Colonize to Establish Territorial Rights? strip the atoms of their electrons we ciuld pack electrons and nuclei close enough to- gether to give the densities found in our siars and still have plenty: of empty space left. Theoretical considerations have shown us that with the temperatures and pressures prevail- ing in these dwarf stars we have exactly the conditions to strip atoms.” Of the billions of stars which make up our ‘galaxy only 125 are known to be as near as 33 light years. But Van Maanen’s star is less than 13 light years distant, Sirius is less than nine and Barnard’s star is only about six. These three dwarfs are among the sun’s most imrmaediate neighbors, dwelling just across the street, as it were—mysterious orbs which, if they do not contain precious gold or nable platinum, assuredly do contain matter in forms far more unusual. Has the Bureau of Mines a proper vecord of these claims? Astronomical research received its initial ime pulse in the United States in the fourth dec- ade of the last century, a period marked by the Government’s establishment of an cbserva- tory of national scope at Washington in 1842 and by the erection at Cambridge of the 15- inch telescope in 1847. It is true that pioneer« ing professors had done much industrious ob- serving prior to this time. Prof. Albert Hop- kins of Williams College, Prof. Elias Loomis of Western Reserve and Prof. O. M. Mitchell at Cincinnati had established observatories. But their early efforts were quite obviously eclipsed by the work which began at Har- vard with the setting up of its “incompaable telescope.” ‘The telescope was a gift to the college from public-spirited citizens of Beston. It might also be called a gift from the skies, for the apparition of a dazzling daylight comet in 1843 had so excited public interest that a commit- tee easily raised $25,000 as a telescope fund, That was quite sufficient in the '40s to buy the largest telescope in the world. TH.E instrument was ordered of the famous German makers, Merz & Mahler, who had recently completed a lens of equal size for the Czar of Russia. Besides -this Mus- covite twin, there was not its peer in all the world. Its focal length was 22 feet, its objece tive glass was 15 inches in diameter. It tra- veled across the Atlantic in one of the fast clipper ships Upon its arrival it was mounted on a brick pier which had been erecied on a hilltop in the northern district of Cambridge-— and there you may find it today, under a gray