Science: Astronomers

All the way from Germany by steamer through the Panama Canal, Professor Albert Einstein reached Pasadena last week. He declined to cross the U. S. by rail for fear of raucous rabble, pesky newshawks. Frau Einstein was with him to worry over his comforts. He will study at prim, red-roofed California Institute of Technology and the Mount Wilson Observatory for the next two months. Professor Willem de Sitter, another cosmologist, will study with him. Meanwhile in Washington met the American Astronomical Society for its annual interpretation of the heavens. Solar Burst Dr. Ross Gunn of the Naval Research Laboratory offered a hypothesis that the solar system is composed of the self-adhering fragments of a star which exploded of its own accord. The prevailing hypothesis is Dr. Forest Ray Moulton’s as modified by Sir James Hopwood Jeans, namely, that a big star once passed near a small star (which men call the Sun), and caused some tidal eruptions, which became planets. Pluto an Accident. It was just a ‘lucky accident” that the newest planet Pluto was located where the late Percival Lowell figured that it would be (TIME, March 24, 1930), declared A. A. S.’s retiring president, Professor Ernest William Brown of Yale. Pluto, he thinks, is not heavy enough to cause the Uranian disturbances upon which Lowell based his predictions. Radio & Sunspots. Several years ago Dr. Harlan True Stetson, then of Harvard, observed that radio reception is best when sunspots are least. Later he went to Delaware, Ohio as director of Ohio Wesleyan’s Perkins Observatory, where he got the same correlations. The past year sunspots decreased about 50%, radio reception improved about 400%. Meteoric Static. When the earth swings through a swarm of meteors, radio waves go askew. The meteors ionize and rustle the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, radio’s sounding board around the earth. —Dr. A. Meldon Skellet, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Electric Clocks, run by 60-cycles-per-second powerhouse current, are sufficiently accurate to operate astronomical telescopes. Dr. George Wilber Moffitt is using such a clock at Yerkes Observatory. Dr. Heber Doust Curtis will put one in at the Michigan Observatory.