Star-Dust Man

University of Wisconsin jacks & jills like to go up Madison's Observatory Hill at night. So does sandy-haired 54-year-old Dr. Joel Stebbins, the University's astronomer. Campus wiseheads chuckle over the saying that "many a co-ed has learned about life while Joel learned about the stars." They chuckle too at the way to amuse his friends, Dr. Stebbins vacillates between full Vandyke and Hitler mustache. A gourmet, he counts the table second only to the observatory. He would be an A-1 golfer if he did not let astronomy and eating interfere.

With all their affectionate chaffing, town & gown are proud of the offices and medals which learned societies have given Astronomer Stebbins for first-rate scientific work. They were prouder still last week when Director Otto Struve of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory said that Stebbins had completed "one of the most important pieces of research ever carried out in astronomy."

Dr. Stebbins began the work on Madison s hill. Last year he got a leave of absence, went out to California's Mt Wilson. To Mt. Wilson's 100-in. reflector he attached a photo-electric cell (which translates faint light into a current of electricity) and continued his studies of the brightness and color of stars. At Ann Arbor Mich, last month he was ready to tell the National Academy of Sciences that estimates of star distances from the earth must be revised from 10% to 200%. Other astronomers hailed his announcement as confirmation of their own researches in the subject during the past ten years.

Everyone knows that the setting sun looks red because man sees it through an earth-enveloping cloud of gas and dust With his cell and reflector Dr. Stebbins found the same apparent redness in the

stars and clusters near the central line of the Milky Way. Hence he reasoned that outer space must also contain an extended cloud of particles, gas or dust Measuring star distances by the strength ot the light they send earthward astronomers have failed to allow for the light's absorption by this cloud.

Dr. Stebbins' observations bring some objects, like globular clusters, four times nearer the earth than previous estimates have put them. He found relatively little absorption of the light of stars distant from the Milky Way, believes that estimated distances of these need be revised no more than 10%.

More plaudits came to Wisconsin's astronomer last week with the description in the annual report of the Carnegie Institution of an improved type of photo-electric cell which he and his assistants have developed. Used with Mt. Wilson's world's-largest telescope, it will extend man's range of heavenly observation from the present limit of about 25,000,000 light years to some 50,000,000.

Pleased with his unaccustomed publicity, Dr. Stebbins generously credits much of his success to a onetime colleague at the University of Illinois, Mathematical Physicist Jakob Kunz.

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