Word: coronae
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week another scaffolding, moldy with age, was being pounded to splinters by Drs. Donald H. Menzel of Harvard Observatory and J. C. Boyce of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1869 the light of the sun's spectacular corona, trapped in spectroscopes during the scant seconds of a total eclipse, has produced on the spectrogram five mysterious bright lines. Astronomers deduced that the corona, though mostly scattered sunlight, was partly self-luminous. What element made it so? Not knowing, they called it "coronium." As recently as last year, in a standard work on eclipses, "coronium" was treated with respect...
...Joseph C. Boyce of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have at last succeeded in identifying the element responsible for the major part of the sun's coronal radiation, marking the first important step in unravelling a mystery dating from the first observations of the spectra of the corona more than sixty years...
...neutral oxygen atom in the high solar atmosphere and under a peculiar state of excitation has been definitely found to coincide with analysis of three of the strongest coronal lines. For years "coronium" a purely hypothetical element, had been considered the cause of the radiations from the sun's corona, just as the light of nebulae was long attributed to the mythical "nebulium...
...experimenters placed oxygen in a test tube and induced a high excitation in it by electricity; they then examined the gas through a spectroscope and compared the results with the spectrum of the solar corona. Although a slight discrepancy appears in these observations, it can be readily accounted for by the inability to produce in the laboratory the exact conditions...
From this point, it is expected, that other coronal lines will soon be interpreted and the mystery of the corona completely cleared up. The recent discovery at Mt. Wilson of a new star, Nova Ophiuchi, which also shows coronal lines at one stage of its explosive outburst has greatly facilitated this solution of coronal radiation...