Reducing in Space
From takeoff on through its 118-mile-high flight last October, the Aerobee rocket performed perfectly. Then, shortly before it landed, a braking para chute opened with an unplanned jolt.
Two of the on-board cameras were torn loose and wrecked. From the one camera left, Princeton Astronomer Donald Morton was able to recover only three frames of exposed film --and two of those were unusable. But that final frame turned the whole experiment into a resounding success. Last week, after careful analysis of the spectral lines recorded on his film, Morton was able to offer exciting new evidence toward the solution of an old astronomical enigma: Why are there so many white dwarf stars in the sky when there have been so few of the supernova explosions that are believed to produce them?
To account for all of the dwarfs that have been detected in the Milky Way galaxy, supergiant stars would have had to explode every two or three years, instead of at their observed rate of one every two or three centuries. An earlier hint was provided by telescopic observations from the ground, which showed that a few older, cooler supergiants are continuously expelling matter at a sedate velocity of 20,000 m.p.h. Perhaps, after many millions of years, they lost enough mass in this way to be classed as dwarfs. Morton's measurements, which involved ultraviolet light that does not penetrate the earth's atmosphere, make clear that some supergiants are actually spewing out large quantities of matter so fast that they are quickly becoming mere shadows of their former selves.
His spectrograms of four supergiant stars in the constellation of Orion clearly showed that the stars--each about 25 times the mass of the sun--are ejecting great quantities of their matter at speeds as high as 4,000,000 m.p.h. Should they continue to expel matter at this rate, says Morton, they will eventually lose as much as 95% of their mass and turn into white dwarfs.
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