Planets from Nova?

Proxima Centauri, the sun's nearest neighbor among the stars, is 25 trillion miles away from Earth. Even if it had a family of planets, no telescope could reveal them. According to Sir James Jeans, a star which has a brood of planets must be an exceedingly rare thing in the sky; the solar system may be unique among the billions of stars which constitute the Milky Way galaxy. To Sir James it is a simple matter of mathematical probability. He has done much to propagate the "tidal theory" of the solar system's origin which is probably more widely accepted among astronomers than any other. In this view, some 2,000,000,000 years ago, a wandering star happened to swing close to the sun, from which by its gravitational pull it drew out a long filament of hot matter which subsequently broke up and condensed to form the planets. The energy of motion which enabled the planets to assume orbits of revolution around the sun originated in the sidewise pull of the wandering star on the parent filament.

The stars are separated by such unimaginably vast reaches of space that the chance of another such near-collision is almost zero.

Two years ago Dr. Gustaf Stromberg of Mt. Wilson Observatory, an able cosmologist who wears clothes like a janitor's and plays a radio while doing telescope work, evolved a theory which would allow solar systems to be much more frequent.

He believes that the whole Milky Way; was once a nebulous cloud of gas in random motion, in which large clumps condensed because of differences in the gaseous viscosity. Thus a sun and its planets might be formed at the same time, and the original motion of the gas plus the forces of gravitational attraction would provide the motion for planetary revolution.

(Last week another possible source for planetary systems was on the astronomical horizon. Every now & then, for no apparent reason, a star seems suddenly to blow up, throwing off shells of hot gas.

Such a one was Nova Herculis, the famed "new star" of 1934. After its first brilliant flare-up, this nova dropped below naked-eye visibility, down to the 13th magnitude, then recovered to magnitude 6.7, where it remained fairly steady for months. Late in 1936, astronomer David Belorizky of the National Observatory at Marseille, France, noticed that certain lines of the nova's spectrum were double. If a source of light is approaching, its spectrum lines are shifted to one side; if receding, to the other side. Therefore the doubling of the Nova Herculis lines indicated motions both toward Earth and away from Earth. Belorizky now takes this to mean that the cloud of gas around the star is rotating. If the cloud broke up into condensing masses, they would continue revolving around the parent star as planets.

Novae have been spotted so frequently that astronomers believe every star must go through this spectacular performance once or more in the billions of years of its life. Hence if M. Belorizky has interpreted his findings correctly, the universe may be full of planetary systems too distant for any telescope to detect.

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