"Where, How & Why?"

Last week Otto Struve had a triumphant day. On a sugarloaf-shaped mountain in southwestern Texas, Astronomer Struve. already director of the University of Chicago's famed Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, took on an additional job: he officially accepted the directorship of the University of Texas' new McDonald Observatory, which houses the second largest operating telescope in the world. Its mirror is 82 inches across, just under seven feet.*

Otto Struve has seen more of life than most stargazers. Scion of a distinguished line of European astronomers, he was born in Kharkov, Russia, where his ancestors had settled after emigrating from Germany. He studied astronomy at Kharkov's university, served in the Russian Army in the World War, fought on the Turkish front. He fought with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks, fled to Constantinople after the White Russian collapse. While hiding in a coal bunker he found a wad of Imperial Russian banknotes which would have made him rich a few years before but were then worthless. In Turkey, the young scientist worked for a while as a woodchopper in the Sultan's forest, was toting bricks on a construction job when a letter circuitously and providentially arrived offering him a place on the staff of Yerkes Observatory.

After that his troubles were over. When blind Astronomer Edwin Brant Frost retired in 1932, Struve succeeded him as Yerkes' director. His valuable and multifarious work there includes discovery of the biggest star known to man--an almost transparent body four billion miles across which like a monstrous ghost accompanies the well-known star Epsilon Aurigae (TIME, Jan. 24, 1938).

Yerkes has the world's biggest refractor (a telescope equipped with a lens instead of a mirror) but it is only 40 inches in diameter. For years Struve has pined for a big reflector. One day he walked into the office of University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins, told him that the University of Texas had received a bequest of $800,000 for an astronomical observatory. The money had been left by William J. McDonald, a Texas farmer who acquired an interest in science during his youth, an interest he never lost though he became a millionaire banker.

Struve suggested that if the University of Texas provided the observatory and the University of Chicago a staff to run it, they might accomplish more in such a cooperative enterprise than either could separately. Forthright Bob Hutchins forthwith picked up his telephone, called U. of T.'s president, got a favorable answer, and soon the project was under way.

The 82-inch mirror was cast by Corning Glass Works of Corning, N. Y., and ground to within one-millionth of an inch of the mathematically correct curve by Cleveland's Warner & Swasey Co., which also built the telescope tube, mounting and drive mechanism. The site selected was Mt. Locke, 6,791 feet above sea level, 225 miles southeast of El Paso.

For the dedication ceremonies atop Mt. Locke last week more than a dozen astronomical bigwigs were on hand, including five from foreign countries. One of the things they talked about was tapping atomic energy as a source of power, a possibility brighter now than ever before, as a result of splitting uranium atoms with neutrons (TIME, Feb. 6; March 13).

Experts consider McDonald Observatory's mirror the finest piece of astronomical glass ever made. Because of the observatory's southern location, it will cover more sky than any other in the U. S.--all the sky except that relatively small part which lies within 30DEG of the south celestial pole. But it will not probe so far into space or catch such faint stars as Mt. Wilson's 100-incher; and Dr. Struve, candidly admitting these limitations last week, said that it would be used for those wide-vision purposes to which it is especially well adapted.

"What we propose to do," he declared, "is to study intensively the relatively bright stars of our galaxy [the Milky Way]--as individuals and not as statistical material. We want to know why it is that all the matter in the world is segregated essentially in two forms: stars and nebulae. Why are there no stars which exceed in mass a few hundred times the mass of the sun? Why is it that nearly all stars and nebulae consist of the same chemical elements in roughly the same relative proportions as we find them in the sun? Where and how do the stars generate their stupendous energies of light and heat, and what is the ultimate fate of their radiation?"

*Biggest working telescope is Mt. Wilson's 100-incher in California. This will drop to second place and the McDonald instrument to third when Caltech gets its 200-inch giant into action, perhaps next year.

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