Many Motions

A man sitting quietly before his fire may be at peace, but he is not at rest. If he sits long enough:

1) He turns a gigantic somersault, once every 24 hours, because of the earth's daily rotation on its axis. If he lives half way between the North Pole and the Equator, this motion carries him along along at some 700 miles per hour.

2) The earth's annual revolution around he sun swings him in an orbit nearly 200,000,000 miles across at a speed of 18 miles per second.

3) The movement of the whole solar system relative to neighbor stars takes him in the direction of Vega at about 12 miles per second.

4) The whole galaxy to which the sun and all other visible stars belong--the Milky Way--appears to be slowly rotating. Various regions in this great disk, six hundred thousand trillion miles across, rotate at different speeds. Mr. Sit-by-the-Fire swings around the centre of the Milky Way at 170 miles per second.

In Philadelphia last week, famed Edwin Powell Hubble of California's Mt. Wilson Observatory--accepting the Franklin Institute's coveted medal for "extensive study of the nebulae, particularly those outside our galaxy, as a result of which: the dimensions of observed space have been greatly increased"--announced discovery of a fifth motion in which the man sitting before his fire unwittingly shares. This is a motion of the whole Milky Way relative to other star galaxies glimmering in the abysses of space.

Light from the most distant of the external galaxies, when broken up into its component colors by a prism or grating, is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, indicating that the galaxies are retreating in all directions.* For them, the apparent velocity is roughly proportional to the distance. But among the nearest galaxies, this ratio does not hold. The Milky Way appears to be approaching some, receding from others. To isolate this motion, Dr. Hubble had to allow for and discount the sun's own movement within the Milky Way--since he was perforce using the solar system as an observation station. After ten years of accumulating data, he gave it as his opinion last week that the Milky Way is traveling among its neighbor galaxies at a pace of 100 miles per second. Direction of movement is toward the constellation Draco, "The Dragon."

The discovery of further and greater cosmic motions may be made when bigger telescopes (such as Caltech's 200-inch) are completed. At present the visible universe is a galaxy-studded space a billion light-years in diameter. Some day it may be found that this whole aggregation with its hidden fringes is moving as an organized system relative to other aggregations of comparable size, not yet seen.

*Many astronomers, including Dr. Hubble, suspect nowadays that the "Expanding Universe"' may be an illusion instead of a reality. For relatively nearby objects, however, the spectrum shift is taken as a valid measure of velocity.

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