New Planets to Be Discovered

Detectives of the skies, as we may call astronomers, cover huge distances in pursuit of the disturbers of the solar system. On paper, they track planets yet unseen through billions of miles of empty space, until the fugitive can finally be “put on the spot” with the cross-hairs of a huge telescope, or on the sensitive surface of a photographic plate.

When the Moon Comes Down

ASTRONOMERS like to scare their hearers from time to time, like the old-fashioned nurse telling children about ogres, with pictures of the end of the world. It may be burnt up by the exploding sun, or frozen by the sun’s extinction (though the latter is less probable); it may lose all its air by radiation into space, and chemical absorption into the earth. But, at the close, the audience is reassured that their fear of its happening in a million years is baseless—that the earth has at least ten million years of existence ahead—and they go away relieved.

I presume this article is talking about a neutron star, the idea of which was only about two years old at this point. Neutrons had only been discovered four years previously, in 1932.

However, since the first neutron star wasn’t discovered until 1965, it would seem that Kuiper was wrong. And yes, he is the person the Kuiper Belt is named after.

Update: As Jari points out in the comments, he was probably talking about a white dwarf star, not a neutron star. You’d think after listening to 200+ episodes of Astronomy Cast I’d have known better. It does, however, give me a chance to plug my favorite podcast, so that’s a plus.

Star Smaller Than the Earth

AFTER centuries in which they thought the Sun a very small body (one early scientist was banished for estimating it to be a hundred miles across) men reconciled themselves to the fact that it is more than a million times the size of the Earth. And the further shocking fact became apparent, that there are stars a million times larger (in volume) than the Sun. It is therefore somewhat reassuring to our pride that a star has been found, by Dr. Kuiper of Harvard, which he calculates to be smaller than