Science: Splits and Spots

Two suns, circling the earth in separate orbits, one inside the other, with inconceivable complications in the mundane seasons, is the curious prediction credited to Dr. David Todd, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Amherst College. Dr. Todd, who has been making solar studies from an observatory near Philadelphia, discovered a great mass of spots on the eastern edge of the sun, and drew the conclusion that the sun is breaking up. He is said to have claimed that a crack is becoming visible in Old Sol.

But, as usual, the astral doctors disagree. Charitably assuming that the “wild statement” is a journalistic interpretation, other well-known astronomers say that the most that can be predicted is that sun spots in different parts of the sun’s disk appear to be whirling in opposite directions, and thus, possibly, to be giving the impression that there are disruptive tendencies at work in the body.

Just what is happening to the sun is meat for speculation, but most authorities are agreed that there are unusual doings up there. Last year, Dr. C. G. Abbot, of the Smithsonian Institute, announced his measurements of the diminution in the sun’s heat. His results have been independently corroborated by Herbert J. Browne, a Washington meteorologist, who finds that the solar constant, the unit of measurement of solar heat, has declined from a normal of between 1.94 and 1.98 to 1.90 in the past two years. This has lowered the temperature of the open oceans all over the world about 4½ degrees F. If this heat loss should become only twice as great, it is estimated that the permanent polar ice cap would descend over the subarctic and upper temperate zones. Canada would, become almost uninhabitable. Climates everywhere are now upset. Drought is threatening in India and California. These changes in the solar constant appear to move in cycles of about three years. Whether they have any relation to the sun spots is not clear.

Dr. George Ellery Hale, director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, writing in Scribner’s Magazine (June), tells what is now known about sun spots. Sun spots are believed to be (though no astronomer is certain about it) regions of incandescent gas on the sun’s surface, whirling with a centrifugal motion. Although they are really brighter and hotter than the most powerful electric light, they are so much cooler than the ‘body of the sun itself, that they appear to us as dark spots. They move in very definite cycles of eleven years and one month. Starting at the poles of the sun, the spots increase rapidly in number and they move nearer the equator. They are most numerous in parts which correspond to the temperate zones on earth. At the end of the cycle they gradually disappear again; and eleven years after the first cycle began, they start to reappear and proceed through the same process. In 1923 the sun spot cycle was at its low ebb, but spots are again beginning to appear and we may look for the maximum in five or six years.

All sorts of wild theories of their relation to terrestrial conditions have been advanced. They do seem to be of a magnetic nature and to produce electrical and atmospheric disturbances on the earth at certain periods. Professor Tchijewsky, a Russian scientist, has recently come out with a theory that at sun spot maxima, worldly affairs are excited and wars, revolutions, migrations, etc.. break out. He thinks he has traced definite cycles of such historical events in the 19th Century paralleling the sun spots. The purely fantastic character of this conjecture is obvious; the problem of the physical influence of the spots is by no means solved.