Science: Organizer of Heaven

(See front cover) Astronomy deals with Earth, and with everything discernible beyond Earth. Its task is detecting, locating, describing and classifying countless millions of diverse objects—meteors, planets, comets, stars, shining streams of gas. dark clouds of cosmic debris, galaxies and super-galaxies glimmering across unimaginable gulfs of space. To avoid duplication of effort, to facilitate exchange of information and encourage cooperative research, astronomy’s huge and complex task was years ago brought under the scrutiny and partial control of an international body. The International Astronomical Union, undisturbed by terrestrial wars and politics, held its first congress in 1922 at Rome. Since then it has met in England. The Netherlands, the U. S., once every three or four years. Last week it wound up its fifth congress in Paris, with 300 astronomers from 25 nations in attendance.Meeting. The Congress:¶Planned an international map of the nearby sky, an enormous mosaic to consist of 11,000 photographs of which 8,000 are already available. ¶Recommended abandonment of 12-hour time notation, adoption of 24-hour time, already in fairly wide use in Europe. Dropped in 24-hour time are “a. m.” and “p. m.,” 1 p. m. becoming 13 o’clock; 10:30 p. m., 22:30. ¶Received from the Commission on Planets, Comets & Satellites a unanimous opinion that the atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% as rich in oxygen as Earth’s air—insufficient to sustain “life as we know it.”¶Contemplated progress made on the naming of 2,000 minor planets circulating mostly between Mars and Jupiter and of which the largest is Ceres (diameter 480 mi.). ¶Heard the Commission on Meteorites strongly urge the Soviet Government to make further study of the Siberian fall of 1908, heaviest fall of meteorites in history, which scorched trees for miles around, annihilated 1,500 reindeer, dammed the Ognia River. The French Government was also urged to push thorough examination of the Chinguetti, an iron meteorite 325 ft. long and weighing possibly a million tons, which a French expedition stumbled on in 1921 in the wilds of Western Africa.

Men. Presiding over the congress was a U. S. astronomer, square, heavy-jowled Director Frank Schlesinger of Yale Observatory, whose fame is associated with parallax. Earth’s annual orbit around the Sun is 186,000,000 miles across; therefore the direction of stars as observed from Earth on opposite sides of that orbit changes slightly. This change is called parallax. Even the nearer stars are so far off that their parallax is extremely small, and for remote stars it is not discernible at all. Nevertheless since the amount of apparent displacement depends on how far away the star is, parallax furnished the first dependable clue to stellar distances. Beginning in 1903, Frank Schlesinger developed such effective photographic methods of parallax measurement that now some 2,000 have been accurately determined. Elected president of the next Congress, to be held in 1938 at Stockholm, was Ernest Esclangon, 59, director of the observatories at Paris and Meudon and Professor of Astronomy at University of Paris.

Elected vice president of the next Congress was Walter Sydney Adams, 58, director of California’s Mt. Wilson Observatory which, because it has the biggest (100-inch) telescope on Earth, is called the “astronomical capital of the world.” Wry, hollow-eyed, pucker-mouthed Dr. Adams, who still talks with a New England accent, has done abstruse work on stellar velocities in the line of sight, solar rotation, spectroscopic measurement of star temperatures. Lately he discovered quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus, and, by an ingenious trick of using the Moon for a mirror to analyze earthshine (TIME, Jan. 15, 1934), confirmed the suspected scarcity of oxygen on Mars. He does not believe that life exists on any solar planet except Earth.

Heading the Commission on Stellar Spectra was tall, spare, eager Henry Norris Russell, 57, of Princeton, one of the most brilliant and possibly the most scholarly and professorial of U. S. astronomers. Years ago he showed that the luminosities, temperatures and chemical constitutions of stars are so related that most can be lumped in a “Main-Sequence” (of which the Sun is a member) with a few such abnormal stars as giants, supergiants and white dwarfs* left outside. He writes readable popular articles for Scientific American, believes Earth’s atmospheric oxygen will be exhausted in 1,000,000,000 years.

Sixteen countries had one man each on a committee chosen to direct the work of the Union until the next Congress, three years hence. The U. S. man was Dr. Russell. Canada’s man was Joint Stanley Plaskett, director of the Dominion Astro-Physical Observatory at Victoria, B. C., whose 72-inch telescope is the world’s third largest.* Dr. Plaskett’s work on the motions of stars in the Milky Way, the galaxy to which Earth belongs, helped greatly to show that the whole immense disk was rotating about its centre, once every 250,000,000 years. Dr. Plaskett’s latest estimate of this local galaxy increased its star population by 600%, to 170,000,000,000. Yet he crowds this population into a smaller space, because his spectroscopic work indicated a thin gas pervading interstellar space, dimming and reddening starlight and thus making the stars appear farther away than they are. He would therefore reduce the diameter of the galaxy from 200,000 light-years to 100,000.†Even across this cramped system the Sun would be invisible through the most powerful telescope made by man.

Traveler. The astronomers would have been startled if the alert, busy, unruly-haired man who runs Harvard Observatory had not been very much present during the Paris Congress, because he probably covers more ground than any other astronomer not only on Earth but in celestial space. Dr. Harlow Shapley headed the Commission on Variable Stars when the International Astronomical Union met at Cambridge, England in 1925, again at the 1928 meeting in Leyden. In 1932 he took a taxi instead of a ship because the Congress met in Cambridge, Mass. In 1933 he went to Mexico to inspect its National Observatory, sojourned for a while at University of Missouri as a research councilor. Early in 1934 he visited 13 islands in the West Indies, had a look at Southern stars. In May he went to London to deliver the George Darwin Lecture before the Royal Astronomical Society, receive its gold medal. In January of this year he gave the Harris Lectures at Northwestern University; in March, the Phi Beta Kappa address at University of Rochester. Last month, hardly back from University of Toronto where he received his eighth honorary degree, he took ship with his wife, his daughter and one of his four sons for the Paris convention. His next jump is back to Cambridge where he has an odd but efficient revolving desk, three telephones and a dictaphone, and where he will conduct a course at the Harvard Summer School of Astronomy which is inaugurating this year a program of advanced study and research.

It was fearfully hot in Paris. Yet Dr. Shapley attended the Congress sessions every day, chatted indefatigably with fellow astronomers in cafés and hotels, on busses. He somehow found time to visit Fontainebleau and the Meudon Observatory near Versailles, hear Rigoletto at the Opera, attend President Lebrun’s reception and garden party, dine a few times at Rumpelmayer’s, take dinner on the Eiffel Tower’s halfway platform on Bastille Day, watch the fireworks, prowl the streets later.

Dr. Shapley was president of the Commission on Nebulae and Star Clusters, celestial departments of which he is a consummate master. He reported and commended surveys of galaxies of stars beyond the Milky Way (“island universes”) undertaken at a half-dozen observatories, singled out for especial compliment Edwin Powell Hubble’s collection of nebulae down past the 19th magnitude of brightness, revealed that Harvard’s total of discovered but unpublished nebulae in the Northern and Southern hemispheres was 140,000, most of them fainter than the 16th magnitude.*Hot Ants & Hot Stars. Harlow Shapley was born 49 years ago in Nashville, Mo. His mother was one of the Massachusetts Stowells who reached the U. S. in 1640. His father, a teacher, died when Harlow and his brother John were boys. Though there was not much money for their education,† both went to Carthage Academy. After Carthage, young Harlow worked for a year as a newshawk, retains to this day a journalistic sense which makes his books (Flights from Chaos, Star Clusters) popular, his lectures non-soporific. At 20 he entered the University of Missouri, fell under the spell of Astronomer Frederick Hanley Scares and published, when he was a junior, a juicy paper on “Astronomy in Horace” with no less than 46 references to the works of that Latin poet. After a year of post-graduate work he went to Princeton as a research fellow in astronomy, made his abilities apparent to kindly Henry Norris Russell. With Princeton’s Ph. D. in his pocket, Dr. Shapley went on to Mt. Wilson, taking with him his bride, Martha Betz of Kansas City, who became something of an astronomer herself and helped him with his papers.

Cepheid variables might be called the aristocrats of the sky. Only about 300 of them are known, and most of them are hot, yellow, super-giant stars. They vary about one magnitude in brightness in cycles averaging a little less than a week. Before Shapley went to Mt. Wilson, it was widely believed that Cepheid variables were eclipsing binaries—twin stars spinning like a dumbbell around a common centre of gravity. In 1914, the year he reached that famed peak, he put forward his pulsation theory, explaining that the Cepheids were single stars, alternately shrinking and swelling in response to some rhythmic internal disequilibrium. Subsequent confirmations bore him out in full. While gluing his eyes and brain on the Cepheids, Harlow Shapley made the discovery on which most of his monumental later work was based. Measurements of parallax yielded the distances of near stars, other methods those of stars farther away, but many of the Cepheids were so remote that their distances long remained unknown. Shapley found, however, that the absolute brightness of a Cepheid was directly related to its period of variation. Since the difference between the absolute brightness and the apparent brightness as seen from Earth depends on how far away a star is, Shapley at once found himself with a key to stellar distances which, when he worked them out, blew out the universe to staggering dimensions.It was at this crucial point that Dr. Shapley got into a curious sidetrack— entomology. He noticed that the hotter an ant was the faster it would run along a track, developed a theory and the experimental means for using ant-speed to measure temperature within a degree, published papers with such titles as Thermokinetics of Dolichoderine Ants and Pterergates in the California Harvester Ant. Biologists promptly leaped to examine the thermokinetics of other creatures, but astronomers sighed with relief when Harlow Shapley finally returned to investigating such spectacular phenomena as the Great Nebula in Andromeda and forgot about all ants except for some bottled specimens which he still keeps on his desk.

Systems & Super-Systems. It was in 1921 that Harlow Shapley, 36, became direct or of Harvard Observatory, succeeding the late great Edward Charles Pickering. Awaiting Shapley at Harvard was the most complete collection of celestial photographs in the world, cared for and classified by methodical Annie Jump Cannon. Harvard, ranking among the world’s top dozen observatories, is the Western hemisphere’s broadcasting centre for astronomical news. But what chiefly interested the new director was the plate collection, because at Mt. Wilson he had already begun his work on the structure of the Universe. As Nature abhors a vacuum, so does Harlow Shapley abhor chaos, disorder, lack of system. As late as 1919, the Universe seemed to many a distinguished astronomer a more or less helter-skelter aggregation of stars, dark stuff and luminous nebulae—altogether not more than 20,000 light years across, with the Sun at the centre, and empty space beyond. Shapley, with his key to the tremendous distances of the Cepheid variables, knew better. He mapped loose star-clusters containing Cepheids in the plane of the Milky Way, tight clusters above and below. The galaxy that then took shape was a vast discoid system 200,000 light-years across. The Sun and its midget cohort of planets was not at the centre, but two-thirds of the way out toward the boundary. The centre was in the dark regions of Sagittarius, 62,000 light-years away from the Solar System. But the Sun was near the centre of its own local system, and such smaller systems were given the dignity of cosmic units. Shapley suspected, as Immanuel Kant had suspected more than two centuries before, that some of the luminous nebulae were not clouds of shapeless matter within the Milky Way, but great aggregates of stars lying far outside. The external nature of these objects was finally demonstrated in 1925 by Mt. Wilson’s Hubble, who measured the distance of Messier 33 at 875,000 lightyears. The farthest “island universe” known today is 500,000,000 light-years away (TIME, Feb. 4). And the total number of such nebulae in the observable universe is probably 100,000,000.

Now Organizer Shapley had something he could really get his teeth into. One thing that distressed him was that the Milky Way seemed so much bigger than the star-clouds outside that galaxy. He was unwilling to consider the Milky Way a monster in an otherwise normal cosmos. The difficulty was resolved when he found in the Coma-Virgo region a concentrated group of star-clouds—a galaxy of galaxies. Others of these super-galaxies (he calls them “super-systems”) were quickly found. Now it seemed more reasonable to regard the Milky Way system as a supergalaxy consisting of the Milky Way proper, the globular clusters lying above and below it, and the nearby Small and Large Clouds of Magellan, only 80,000 or 90,000 light-years away—a supergalaxy of normal size in comparison with other super-systems.

Thus Harlow Shapley, now about halfway along in his detailed census of the all-embracing Universe, was able to trace in Nature a continuous train of systems from the smallest known thing to the largest. Atoms with their electrons and nuclei are systems; so are molecules and molecular combinations such as crystals and colloids. Men, monkeys and chinch-bugs are colloidal aggregates. Then come meteoritic associations (comets, meteor streams), systems of satellites, stars, double and multiple stars, star clusters, galaxies, super-galaxies. Above all, the Universe of universes—the Metagalaxy.”That,” says Harlow Shapley, “is as far as astronomy takes us. Beyond that is metaphysics, and whatever approach thereto the individual may prefer. Most astronomers are agnostics. Not atheists— that presumes more conviction than religion does. Scientists cannot have faith. Ours is a perpetual inquiry; any acceptance of faith—in a scientific or a metaphysical or an esthetic sense—brings inquiry to a halt.”

*Most famed white dwarf, of which only three have definitely been spotted, is the companion of Sirius whose density is approximately half a ton to the cubic inch. *World telescope ranking: Observatory Diameter of Reflector Mt. Wilson…….. 100 in.Dunlap (Toronto)……………………………….74 in. Dominion …………………………………….72 in. Perkins (Delaware, Ohio)…………………….. 69 in. Harvard ……………………………………………..61 in. Argentine National (Cordoba)…………………….60 in. Harvard (South Africa) ………………………………60 in. Berlin-Babelsburg ………………………………….48½in. Melbourne…………………………………………….. 48 in. †One light-year=approximately six trillion miles. Traveling 186,000 miles per second, light takes only eight minutes to reach Earth from the Sun.

*Only the first six magnitudes are visible to the naked eye. Limit of Mt. Wilson’s giant telescope is the 20th magnitude.†Brother John is now Professor John Shapley, Chairman of University of Chicago’s Department of Art.