Word: nebula
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...last week's Nature magazine, R. Hanbury Brown and C. Hazard of Britain's University of Manchester announced that they had detected radio stars in M. 31, the great spiral nebula in Andromeda, 750,000 light-years from the earth. They did the job with the largest radio telescope (a trellis-like "dish" of wires) at Jodrell Bank Experimental Station south of Manchester. Normally this telescope points upward, receiving radio waves from a narrow "beam" directly overhead. If the mast at the center is swung 14° to one side, the telescope points, in effect, toward the Andromeda...
Extra-sensitive equipment was necessary, and the radio astronomers had to wait for still, rainless nights, though radio reception from the stars is not ordinarily affected by the weather. Six times they allowed the rotation of the earth to sweep the telescope past the nebula. Each time they moved the mast slightly to cover a different strip of sky. In the four middle sweeps they found what they were looking for: low peaks in the curves representing radio energy reaching the telescope. Careful analysis of the curves showed that the waves must have come from an oval object like...
Among modern astronomers, an old theory of the origin of the solar system was back in fashion. German Philosopher Immanuel Kant had speculated in 1755 that the sun and its planets were formed by condensation out of a gaseous cloud. For a while astronomers supported Kant, but later his "nebula hypothesis" lost scientific favor. More modern astronomers, notably Sir James Jeans, have conceded that the sun may have been formed that way, but not the planets. To explain the planets, Jeans suggested that another star must have grazed the sun, pulling out a thread of sun-matter that gathered into...
Menzel, who plans to expand the whole Climax set-up, has written several the-ories on the cause of the aurora and magnetic storms. This summer he proved that a ring nebula--a ring of bright gas surrounding a star--was actually composed of huge comets...
Astronomer Nicholas U. Mayall of Lick Observatory, Calif., was taking routine pictures of N.G.C. 6964, a spiral nebula four million light-years away. On one of the plates last week his practiced eye discovered a monstrous star that should not have been there. It was a supernova, an obscure star that had exploded suddenly. When Dr. Mayall photographed it first, its "absolute brilliance" was equal to two million suns. It had probably faded from a peak a few weeks ago of four million suns. If any planets had been revolving around that unstable star, they were certainly vaporized...