Solar Bombardment

COMMUNICATIONS Solar Bombardment

On Easter Sunday, telegraph wires hummed with holiday messages. Suddenly something went blooey. Teletype messages began to arrive in jumbles like pied type. Short-wave radio to Europe, to ships at sea, was blotted out, stayed blotted for several hours. Wire photos arrived looking like surrealistic blobs. Cursing engineers pronounced it the worst disruption of service in the historyof long-distance telephone and radio communication.

Cause of the trouble: sunspots. According to astronomers' most plausible theory, sunspots shoot out streams of protons and electrons, electrified subatomic particles. The group of spots on the sun last week was 400,000,000 sq. mi. in area. This was not the biggest spot group of recent years; in fact, the eleven-year sunspot cycle is now in a declining phase. But this time the earth was right in the line of fire.

Because of interference from the sun's own magnetic field, sunspots spray out their particle beams unevenly. The earth may therefore suffer severely from relatively small sunspots if it happens to be in a dense region of the particle beam. Moreover, as the spot cycle wanes, the spots tend to crowd around the sun's equator, and Dr. Harlan True Stetson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's authority on "cosmic-terrestrial relations," believes that equatorial spots get a truer bead on earth than others. Finally, the earth last week had barely passed the spring equinox, at which time its axis is about perpendicular to the sun. Thus the bombardment was broadside to the earth's north-south magnetic field. Dr. Stetson believes this happenchance helped make things worse.

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