New Moons

Bright enough to leave a long silvery reflection on a dark river is the monster planet Jupiter now shining in the southeastern sky. Three hundred times larger than the earth, containing more matter than all the other planets combined, Jupiter takes twelve years to complete its ponderous revolution around the sun. Far from the centre of the solar system, Jupiter receives little heat, has a small core of solid rock, surrounded by a frozen ocean, thousands of fathoms deep. Thick clouds hide from astronomers the furious storms that rack the planet, scarring its face with wide bands of purple, red and brown.

Four satellites, large as our moon, swing rapidly around Jupiter, all keeping the same face towards the master star, but each night displaying themselves in a different arrangement. Sometimes they disappear behind the planet, sometimes they fade into its shadow, or rush in front of it. In 1610, equipped with only a two-foot wooden telescope, Galileo discovered Satellites I-IV. On a clear night they are visible with a good pair of field glasses. Of the five other faint satellites. Satellite V was discovered by Edward Emerson Barnard at the University of California's Lick Observatory in 1892, VI and VII by C. D. Perrine also at Lick in 1904-1905, and VIII by Melotte at Greenwich in 1908. Discovery of the satellites was not only a telescopic feat, but a matter of practical importance to astronomy. As far back as 1675, Ole Roemer, Danish astronomer, noting that the eclipses of Satellite I varied with the distance of the earth from Jupiter, discovered the motion of light, and made the first calculation of its velocity.

In 1914, Seth Barnes Nicholson, keen-eyed young graduate student at Lick Observatory, sighted Satellite IX. Last week the Carnegie Institution of Washington announced that Dr. Nicholson, still in California looking for new moons, had discovered dim, elusive Satellites X and XI with Mt. Wilson's 100-inch telescope.-- "This discovery will rank as one of the great advances in astronomy of 1938," stated Director James Stohley of Philadelphia's Fels Planetarium. "There will be no hope of observing [the new satellites] except with the greatest telescopes."

*En route to Palomar Mountain, Calif, are the 48 structural steel parts of the giant 200-inch telescope which will bring to focus four times as much light as the 100-inch telescope, make visible at least two billion stars now unseen.

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