NEW FIELD IN STUDY OF SHOOTING STARS DEFINED

Shannon News, 25 January 1929, Page 2

NEW FIELD IN STUDY OF SHOOTING STARS DEFINED

More extensive study of shooting stars should be undertaken by astronomers as the first step in acquiring data in a field that is as yet practically untouched, according to Dr. Harlow Shapley of the Harvard Observatory in a lecture at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Dr. Shapley recalled that about 1,000,000,000 meteors rush through the earth’s atnjosphere each day, and declared that a study of these phenomena should yield important information that is needed to confirm or overthrow existing theories. “I should like to set up stations in various parts of the world in high desert areas and commence watching them,” he said. “If we could do that for the next 15 years we would probably be in good, direct contact with one of the fundamental principles of cosmogony. This is one utterly untilled field of astronomy about which hardly anything has been found out.”

All research has borne out Professor Einstein's theory of relativity, he said, and has served to substantiate the German professor’s theory that the ether actually “curves back” and does not go on indefinitely through space.

Workers in the Harvard tory are now able to observe stars 1,000,000 light years distant in space and which, according to present measurements, have still a thousand times farther to go before they reach their end, he said.

‘ ‘ Our own earth, perhaps fortunately, is in a rather dull part of'space,” ho continued. "In the 1,000,000,000,000 years of its conjectured existence it has experienced very little 'bumping’ with other bodies, slight breaking up or growth by coalescing with other stars and planets. Yet we do know now that the stars really evolve and are not merely unchangable masses.” The astronomer is constantly sui 1 - rendering his old theories to conform with newly discovered facts, Dr. Shapley said, but "his observations stand unchanging. ’ ’