WONDER SCIENCE

Hokitika Guardian, 8 January 1931, Page 5

WONDER SCIENCE

ADVANCES IN ASTRONOMY. NEW INSTRUMENTS USED. 1 LONDON, October 30. Forty years progress in the exploration of the ever-expanding * heavens were marked by the anniversary in October of the British Astronomical Association. In those forty years astronomy has gone ahead more than it ever did during the whole of its earlier history. Questions have been solved, spell as the distance and magnitude of the more remote stars, which were them regarded as absolutely hopeless. The largest of these stars are actually bigger than the entire orbit of the earth.

Forty years ago the largest telescope at Greenwich was the Rosse 6ft. instrument. Now there are instruments which can probe beneath the earth’s atmosphere and measure the very promontories on the surface beneath by photography. Such an instrument has lately been presented to Greenwich Observatory. Of almost equal interest is the work ot the Rev. T. E. R. Phillips, qn the hurricane movements on the' surface of Jup-iter which exceed our greatest hurricanes in speed. They continue for months and months. Two regions of the surface may be moving with speeds differing in hundred*? of miles. Jupiter’s satellites always tor: the same face toward the parent body, past as the moon does toward the earth. Our astronomers can see both sides, but Jupiter cannot, though it is so much nearer.

If we could communicate with Mars .one of the first questions we should like its inhabitants to answer is:— “ What does the back of the moon look like

On a'.- lonely island in mid-Pat-iftc scientists are attempting the confirmation of Einstein's theory of the universe. Light from far distant stars will be photographed . 'as. it \ pussrc near the eclipsed sun. and from the extent to which it is deflected v an accurate confirmation may he obtained of the theory' of relativity. An attempt will also be made to analyse, the: 'light emitecl by the sun’s atmospheric layer, the depth of which is roughly equal to the radius ot the earth. Previous total eclipses have supported Einstein’s theory rather than the traditional theory.' but the agreement has not been sufficiently good to be decisive. The most favourable opportunity for the nurposo will be in 1937, when there is an eclipse of seven minutes in Peru.