Science: Starry Shower

One of the earth’s favorite playmates in the lonely vastness of space is the Gia-cobini-Zinner comet, which sweeps around the sun in a lopsided orbit once every six and a half years. In 1933, two sweeps ago, the earth passed within 500,000 miles of the place where the comet had been 80 days before. The result: a gaudy shower of meteors.

This year, the comet was due again, and astronomers calculated that this time the earth would pass only 131,000 miles from the place it had been eight days before. As astronomers measure distances, this is a cat’s-whisker miss. The earth’s gravitational pull would capture thousands, perhaps millions, of meteors: small bits of straggling comet stuff. When they plunged into the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour and turned into incandescent gas, the show would be the best since 1933.

The great day came last week, but thick clouds spoiled the fun for much of the eastern U.S. Astronomers, forewarned, had readied more precise instruments than the earthbound human eye. At Boston, a group of Harvardmen borrowed a Coast Guard patrol plane, found a patch of open sky near Nova Scotia. The meteors, they reported, streaked across the sky about 17 per minute, most of them as bright as Venus. Said Harvard’s famed Dr. Harlow Shapley: “It was the richest show we’ve had in this century.”

Dr. J. A. Pierce of Harvard bounced radio waves off the meteor trails. His gadget gave a dramatic whistle, like the screech of an approaching shell, whenever a meteor hit the atmosphere. Other scientists took to radar, which can see through clouds as if they were Cellophane. At the Bureau of Standards’ laboratory near Sterling, Va., they watched bright blobs of light on a radarscope. These were made, they said, by the radar beam reflected from hot, ionized gases—the remains of meteors as they disintegrated in the atmosphere 50 to 80 miles up.