Cosmic Prodigy

A faint star which is 50,000 times less luminous than the sun (and which may be the sun's nearest neighbor in interstellar space) was reported recently by astronomers of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin (TIME, May 23). Last week Dr. Fritz Zwicky of California Institute of Technology announced discovery of a star at the other extreme of cosmic brightness--400,000,000 times as bright as the sun.

This brightness was manifested at the peak of a stellar explosion. The star has now subsided to 1,000,000 times the sun's luminosity.

Dr. Zwicky has been specializing for several years in the study of supernovae or "new stars" which explode with such violence that they probably cease to exist as ordinary stellar bodies. According to the Zwicky theory they coalesce into dense globes of neutrons (electrically inert particles).

The star reported last week is so far away that it is not even in the Milky Way galaxy, 600 quadrillion miles in diameter, to which the solar system and all stars visible to the naked eye belong. In it the neutrons are so closely packed, according to Zwicky, that the density reaches the enormous figure of 6,000,000 tons to the cubic inch. Since the General Theory of Relativity imposes limits on stellar masses, Zwicky's new star must be exceedingly small to compensate for its high density. The astronomer estimates its diameter at no more than 60 miles.

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