Science: Sky News

Sky news of last week included:

Jupiter’s Spot. Abbe Moreux. director of Bourges Observatory at Bourges, France, after looking at Jupiter for a month, announced that he had found another red spot on the planet. The patch is slowly growing bigger. He thinks it may be an immense frozen continent, 30,000 mi. long, 7,000 mi. wide. Other astronomers have seen these spots before, have not been able to find out what they were because they did not possess strong enough telescopes to study them. Just before the War a vivid spot was noted, was interpreted by the superstitious as a sign of bloodshed. Sometimes the patches remain motionless for months, at other times they appear to be rolling about, chasing one another over Jupiter’s surface. Why they act in this way has never been determined.

Perkins Reflector. Six years ago a new electrically operated telescope, one of the most costly in the world, was installed at the Perkins Observatory, Delaware, Ohio. The telescope required a 69-in. reflector, third largest in the world. The reflector required more than five years to make. Until it was finished the Perkins astronomers got along as best they could with a small reflector loaned by Harvard University. Last week, after being polished for two years, the large mirror was ready to be installed. Director Harlan True Stetson, onetime Harvard astronomer, watched the installation, summed up in his mind two problems he wants to solve with it: the causes of solar storms, which have a great effect upon terrestrial weather and radio reception; the cosmic clouds which he thinks may surround the earth and sun, may influence the intensity of solar radiation. Perkins Observatory was founded at Ohio Wesleyan University by one of its teachers of mathematics and astronomy, Hiram Mills Perkins. For 50 years, lie saved and invested his $1,800 salary. Before he died he turned back to the university all the money he had, $300,000, instructed them to build an astronomical laboratory with it.

Red Shift. When almost a century ago, Christian Johann Doppler, Austrian physicist, declared that sound and light would be changed in wave lengths if they proceeded from a moving source or to a moving observer,* astronomers looked through their telescopes at the far away stars and found that he was correct. They discovered that light from some stars appeared redder than normal, others appeared bluer, concluded that the red stars (the longer wave lengths) were moving away from the earth, the blue stars (shorter wave lengths) were moving toward the earth.†Last week. Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble, Mount Wilson Observatory astronomer, told visiting members of the National Academy of Sciences that he had rechecked this phenomenon of the spectral shift through the Mount Wilson telescope which can see farther into space than any other telescope in the world. Dr. Hubble analyzed 34 nebulae carefully by means of a spectroscope which breaks up a ray of light, shows the different colors of the spectrum which compound it. He found with few exceptions a uniform shift toward the red from the nearest to the farthest nebula, 75 million light years away. For every million-light-years increase in distance from the earth, he discovered a 100-mi.-per-sec. increase in the speed of receding stars. Occasional exceptions of a shift toward the blue, he said, were caused by individual motions of the nebulae, which may be either away from or toward the earth, contrary to the general recessive movement.

The red shift has figured largely in modern ideas of cosmic structure. Albert Einstein predicted as a consequence of his relativity theory that light from large bodies would show a shift toward the long end of the spectrum, that this shift did not mean a real movement away from earth. Willem De Sitter, on the contrary, claimed it as evidence that matter is constantly tending to scatter, expand the limits of the universe.

*Laymen prove Dopplers theory every time they come to a railroad crossing. The pitch of the crossing bell grows higher as it is rapidly approached, falls lower as it is left behind.

†Not to be confused with the giant blue stars, the hottest of all, and the red stars (of low temperatures). These stars give more red and blue light regardless of movement.