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2,000-In. Telescope. Mt. Wilson Observatory's 100-inch mirror is the world's biggest telescope mirror now in use. Two hundred inches is the diameter, $12,000,000 the cost of Mt. Wilson's new mirror, still incomplete after years in construction. Plans for an "electronic" telescope, equal in magnifying power to an instrument equipped with a 2,000-inch mirror, were outlined by Dr. Francois Henroteau of Ottawa's Dominion Observatory. The projected telescope will be electrical, not optical. Dr. Henroteau and his aides have discovered how to deposit 25,000,000 minuscule silver dots on a square inch of thin mica plate. Starlight falling on the silvered mica will be scanned by photoelectric cells, which will convert the image into feeble electric current, which in turn will be amplified tremendously by three-electrode vacuum tubes. The result will be a photograph clear enough to bring remote stars into Earth's "back yard."
Star Wind. Dr. Otto Struve, director of Yerkes Observatory, told of discerning by spectroscopic observation what seemed to be furious hurricanes in the atmosphere of some stars. On one hitherto inconspicuous star the wind seemed to be blowing at the rate of 144,000 m.p.h. Dr. Struve added that, despite the surface turbulence visible in hydrogen photographs, the sun's atmosphere is practically windless.
Star study was a natural groove for dimple-chinned Dr. Struve, 36. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father were astronomers. Like War Student Nikolai Golovine, he is Russian-born and a one-time Imperial soldier. After the Revolution he fought with the White Armies, fled to Constantinople in 1921, a year ago succeeded blind Professor Edwin B. Frost as boss of Yerkes.
Milky Way. An estimate 600% higher than any previous census of stars in the Milky Way (the galaxy to which Earth belongs) was given by Drs. J. S. Plaskett and J. A. Pearce of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory at Victoria, B. C. Their total was 170 billion stars. The Milky Way is apparently rotating round a centre once every 220,000,000 years. From this centre they find the solar system 30,000 light years away.
"Disordered Universe." An outstanding player in astronomy's game of juggling and revising figures is tousle-haired Director Harlow Shapley of Harvard Observatory. To him last week the American Academy of Arts & Sciences presented its Rumford Medal for research in physics. Dr. Shapley responded with a talk on "The Anatomy of a Disordered Universe."
His disordered universe was not the cosmologist's all-embracing universe but the Large Magellanic Cloud, nearest galaxy to the Milky Way. With a microphotometer, a special camera and an able staff, he found in the Cloud more than 500 new variable stars and enough star clusters in its neighborhood to make its diameter seem 20,000 light years, double the previous estimate. His present objective is to locate, by measuring the amount of cosmic material in different directions and at different distances, the centre of the all-embracing universe — if such a centre exists.