Word: spaces
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...became a scientific necessity 18 years ago. With the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble had made one of the most flabbergasting discoveries science has ever made. The whole visible universe, Hubble's data told him, is apparently exploding. The matter in space appears to be flying apart far faster than the white-hot gases of detonating...
...Into Space. Even as an apprentice astronomer, Hubble concentrated on the nebulae-the faint patches of light scattered among the stars. Some had been proved mere wraiths, irregular clouds of dust shining by reflected starlight. Others, more interesting, were globes, ellipses, open spirals like patterns of fire from great spinning pin wheels. When the brightest of these were photographed with powerful telescopes, they dissolved into vast congregations of faint stars, whose dimness suggested that they might be very far away. But astronomers, lacking a proper measuring stick, were not agreed. Some thought that the nebulae were comparatively near and small...
...Harvard, told him that the bright nebula called Messier 31 is 680,000 light-years away. Messier 31 was therefore no mere part of the Milky Way galaxy (the star-congregation in which our sun is a fourth-rate star), but an isolated star-system far out in space and as big as our entire galaxy. Other, longer-ranged measuring sticks carried him farther on his march into space. By this time most of the world's astronomers were looking over his broad shoulders, or helping him with their own observations, as he trudged out into the universe with...
...second). But Hubble and Humason have clocked a nebula about 250 million light-years away that seems to be moving at 26,000 miles per second, more than one-eighth the speed of light. They have glimpsed nebulae twice as far away. If the nebulae continue, on & on into space, they will eventually exceed the relativistic speed limit. Therefore, argue the critics, something is wrong with the speed-distance rule...
...luminous body's motion away from the observer "pulls out" the light waves, making them longer (redder) than normal. But since red light contains less energy per unit (photon) than violet light, Bubble's critics suggest that light may lose some of its energy in traversing space, thus turning redder. It may start out from a distant nebula as young, vigorous violet and arrive at the earth after millions of weary years as old, tired red. If that is what happens, perhaps nebulae are not moving...