The Neighbors

Man has been studying the stars for thousands of years, but he has been overlooking a couple of his nearest neighbors in the universe.

Last week, the University of Minnesota's Dr. Willem Jacob Luyten announced that he had discovered a double star which is only about six light years (35 trillion miles) away from the solar system. It is thus the nearest known star that can be seen regularly in the Northern Hemisphere. (The nearest of all stars, Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri, are 4.3 light years away, but are usually visible only.in the Southern Hemisphere.)

The earth's new-found neighbors are not the kind to attract attention to themselves. Dr. Luyten, Java-born and Holland-educated, discovered them only by comparing photographic plates made at the Harvard College Observatory's station in South Africa in 1930 with other plates made there in 1944. So shy and retiring are the twins that their light would have to be 100 times stronger than it is to be seen by the naked eye.

In the constellation Cetus (the Whale), the twin stars will be known to astronomers as L 726-8 (L for Luyten, the figures to indicate position in the sky). Both stars are red and much cooler than the sun, which gives out 40,000 times as much light as one unit, 60,000 times as much as the other. The twins revolve around each other every 20 to 25 years, keeping about 275 million miles apart.

Though the twins seem old, cold and aloof, one of them recently blew its top. Last Dec. 7, says Luyten, "the fainter of the two stars was seen to flare up suddenly to twelve times its normal brilliance and to subside again in less than 20 min utes, a phenomenon which, so far, is unique among stars . . . The atomic explosion . . . amounted to the equivalent of a billion atomic bombs of the Hiroshima type."

If this ever happened to the sun, saic Luyten in an understatement of the first magnitude, "people on earth would have very uncomfortably hot quarter of an hour."

Staying closer to home, other astronomers have been studying the sun's immediate family of planets. Last week, New York University's Dr. Hans Panofsky gave the American Meteorological Society the latest word on Jupiter's atmospheric oddities. Oddest is the "red spot," a cloud 30,000 miles long and about 10,000 miles wide which goes around the planet's axis in a little less than ten hours. Its speed varies a few yards per second; so do the earth's westerly winds. Both, presumably, are reacting to a common cause--something in the sun. Dr. Panofsky would like to know what it is.

Seymour Hess, of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., reported to the meteorologists that Mars is a dry place indeed. There is so little water vapor in its atmosphere that if it all fell at once as rain, it would register less than a hundredth of an inch.* And the Martians (if any) are living in a rarefied atmosphere only one-twelfth as dense as the earth's.

* If all the earth's atmospheric moisture were precipitated, it would make about one inch.

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