Coronium Out

No small part of science's labor is devoted to knocking down hypotheses which have been more or less skeptically erected, not with any notion of permanence, but as a sort of scaffolding to bridge gaps which could not be filled with the instruments and information at hand. Example: splitting the light of distant nebulae in their spectroscopes, astronomers got spectrum lines which they could assign to no known element. Accordingly they created by mutual consent a new element, called it "nebulium," and doubted that it existed. Years later they found "nebulium" to "be their familiar friends oxygen and nitrogen, ionized into unfamiliar atomic states.

Last week another scaffolding, moldy with age, was being pounded to splinters by Drs. Donald H. Menzel of Harvard Observatory and J. C. Boyce of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1869 the light of the sun's spectacular corona, trapped in spectroscopes during the scant seconds of a total eclipse, has produced on the spectrogram five mysterious bright lines. Astronomers deduced that the corona, though mostly scattered sunlight, was partly self-luminous. What element made it so? Not knowing, they called it "coronium." As recently as last year, in a standard work on eclipses, "coronium" was treated with respect. The Menzel-Boyce report unmasks it as mostly oxygen in bizarre atomic metamorphoses. The normal oxygen atom has eight orbital electrons. Menzel & Boyce proceeded to imagine oxygen atoms in such a state of excitation that electrons could skip freely from one orbit to another. Such excited atoms, according to quantum theory, should have energy levels differing from each other by precise amounts. Drs. Menzel & Boyce expressed a number of these energy levels mathematically. Then (by extrapolation of the 43-year-old Rydberg method) they mathematically expressed the light-wave frequencies represented by the five mysterious spectrum lines. Last, they brought the two sets of mathematical expressions together. In three cases the correspondence was close enough to remind them of keys fitting into locks, to enable them to say that most of "coronium" is oxygen.

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