Word: spectras
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Your Science article [TIME, June 25] on the work of Humason and the redshift of the nebular spectra is excellent and is interestingly written. However, the story tends to give an inaccurate idea by saying that this effect was "first discovered by Hubble . . . and that on it he based his startling theory of the expanding universe." In reality, I believe you will find that the redshift was first observed by V. M. Slipher of Lowell Observatory. Hubble, however, was the one to notice the law connecting the amount of the shift and the distance of the nebulae...
...great 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain yielded its most significant discovery. Palomar's Dr. Milton La Salle Humason, a diffident, self-effacing expert whose own colleagues know almost nothing about him except his birthplace (Dodge Center, Minn.), last week announced that he had photographed the spectra of nebulae 360 million lightyears* away. He found that their light showed the mysterious "red-shift," indicating that they are moving away from the earth at 38,000 m.p.s.-one-fifth of the speed of light...
Blue to Green. The 200-inch Palomar telescope was built primarily for studying more distant nebulae. It can photograph them as faint blurs at distances something like one billion lightyears, but getting their spectra is more difficult. The light from the nebula is concentrated by the telescope's great mirror upon a prism, which spreads it into a spectrum one-tenth of an inch long. So dim is the image on the photographic plate that four to six hours of exposure are needed to make the picture...
Next, Kuiper examined the greenish areas. Their spectra indicated that they could not be vegetation like trees or grass. But they might be lowly lichens like those that grow on the dry rocks near McDonald Observatory. Lichens need no water in liquid form. Martian lichenlike plants might get enough water out of vapor from the icecaps, which evaporate without melting...
...checked by observing the spectra of stars, especially the dense "white dwarfs," which ought to have intense magnetic fields around their close-packed matter. It might even be proved in earthly laboratories, by spinning large masses of nonmagnetic material, such as bronze, and seeing whether they generate their own magnetic fields. Here was a fascinating assignment for a skillful (and well-financed...