Word: whitford
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Joel Stebbins and A. E. Whitford, of the University of Wisconsin, cast an infra-red ray of hope on astronomy's bitterest sorrow : the invisibility of the Milky Way's nucleus. Even with small telescopes, astronomers can study the galaxies, gigantic clouds of stars which float far off in space. At their centers most galaxies have tight star clusters which may contain much of their mass. These nuclei facinate astronomers, for within them, they suspect, are conditions which exist nowhere else in the universe...
Infra-red rays pierce some clouds ; so Dr. Walter Baade of Mt. Wilson, Calif, photographed the proper part of the sky with infra-red light. His plate showed a dim, ghostly shape (see cut). Drs. Stebbins and Whitford, encouraged, used infra-red light of still longer wave length. They attached a photoelectric cell and an infra-red filter to the Mt. Wilson 60-inch telescope and swept it back & forth across the area where the nucleus ought to be. Their calculations showed a strong elliptical bulge. The happy astronomers did not claim that this was the Milky...
...Whitford hitched another photoelectric cell to a telescope, this time Mt. Wilson's giant 100-incher. As the bands raced past, they knocked from the cell a fluctuating electric current. Dr. Whitford shot the current into an "oscilloscope" to make the fluctuations visible. He took a picture of their pattern of peaks and valleys, then measured the diffraction bands, and from them calculated the diameter of the star...
...reconsider their theories as to the size of the star-filled universe. Ordinary photographs showed fewer & fewer nebulae out near the 500,000,000 light-year limit of range, and some scientists assumed that this might be the approximate radius beyond which lay infinite emptiness. But Astronomers Albert Edward Whitford and Joel Stebbins of the University of Wisconsin knew that the far-off nebulae were reddish (a spectroscopic phenomenon which makes many astronomers believe outer galaxies are moving away from the earth). They also knew that red photographs poorly and suspected a lot of nebulae were being overlooked. Their experiments...
Producer Cornell has gathered a cast of veterans who act like it-Raymond Massey (Sir Colenso), Bramwell Fletcher (the painter), Clarence Derwent, Whitford Kane, Ralph Forbes, Colin Keith-Johnston. Cecil Humphreys is sidesplitting as the pompous Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, who explains that he finds it necessary to live in the style to which his rich patients are accustomed...