Stargazers

Modern astronomy takes in everything from subatomic particles (invisibly small) to the universe (invisibly big). Meeting last week at Columbia University, members of the American Astronomical Society just about covered the whole field. Highlights:

The Stars Waltz. Double stars, whirling in space, are highly prized and much sought after by astronomers. Much of science's information on all stars comes from double stars.

A star may look as if it were on its own while revolving around (and concealing with its glare) a companion star as big as the earth's sun. Such double stars give themselves away by appearing to wobble as they swing around their orbits.

Last week the University of Pittsburgh's Dr. Nicholas E. Wagman announced that the bright star, Alpha Ophiuchi, had a very significant wobble. After watching it for years, he had decided that it must be the dominant member of a couple. Apparently, it was revolving once in eight and a half years around a dimmer star. He did not see the "dark companion" --"dark" only by comparison with the glare of Alpha Ophiuchi.

The double star Zeta Aurigae, said Harvard's Dr. Zdenek Kopal, consists of a smallish blue-white star waltzing through space with a huge "red giant." As he expected, the little star passed behind the big one. But its light did not dim out with proper regularity. Dr. Kopal peered long and hard at his spectro-photographs, concluded that the atmosphere of the red giant had shot out a vast "prominence," 600,000 miles wide. "Watch Zeta Aurigae," he advised the astronomers.

Double Milky Way. The sun is a middle-sized, middle-aged citizen of the star cloud, or galaxy, known as the Milky Way. Astronomers used to think the "home galaxy" was merely a lens-shaped swarm of stars, revolving majestically in space. Now they think it has a more complicated structure. Last week two University of Virginia astronomers reported that the "red giant" stars seemed to be concentrated in a rough sphere near the hub of the galaxy. The commoner white stars (like the sun) had spread out in a wider, thinner disc. This discovery suggested that the red giants and the white stars may have had different origins. Perhaps all the galaxies had been formed in two great and separate spurts of creation.

Flat Space? Some of the astronomers were concentrating on the distant galaxies --or on space itself. One space-gazer (Senor Luis Enrique Erro of the Mexican Astrophysical Observatory) began to throw serious doubts on Einstein's theory of "curved space." Einstein's doctrine, applied to study of the distant galaxies, which seem to be rushing away from the earth at enormous speed, had made the universe appear too young, said Senor Erro. It seemed only a billion years old by Einsteinian reckoning. But geologists have pretty well proved that even the earth is twice as old as that.

What's needed, said Senor Erro, is a better theory of space. He proposed to substitute a theory developed by the late Dr. George D. Birkhoff of Harvard. Applied to the runaway galaxies, the Birkhoff idea would make the universe act its age. It would also reduce the universe's galaxy population to a mere eleven billion. "Birkhoff space" is flat, not curved. But laymen who imagine that that might make it easier to understand should be warned that it is both "flat and four-dimensional."

Static from the Sun. While the theorists spun their theories, two extra-large sunspots crept across the sun. The spots were many times bigger than the earth, big enough to be seen through plain smoked glass. Asked if they would tangle up earth's radios, Astronomer Robert Coles of Manhattan's Hayden Planetarium said, with a gleam in his eye, that "he would not be surprised."

Astronomer Coles was taking few chances: sunspots are monstrous hurricanes in the sun's white-hot atmosphere. From sunspots, or near them,, come powerful blasts of ultraviolet rays and streams of electrons. Both rays and electrons affect earth's radios, chiefly by altering the ionization of the outermost atmosphere.

As predicted, Mackay Radio and Telegraph Co. reported "a complete blackout" of its transatlantic signals. Other radio concerns struggled mightily and got some messages through. The astronomers looked knowing.

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