Another 3 Billion Years

''Quiet days, no important events." This horoscope for Zurich, published by the weekly tourist bulletin, was only half right. The days were quiet enough for the 350 stargazers of the International Astronomers' Union, who met last week for the first time since 1938. But after eight days, some of their conclusions had become important mileposts in man's continuing search to find out more about his universe.

Astronomers from 31 nations attended (the Russians arrived late, but they made it).

The major achievement of the conference was a highly technical "Symposium on Chemical Abundances in the Universe." The astronomers presented further evidence on a favorite theory: in the deep interiors of the stars the nuclear transformations that occur are more powerful but very much like the changes that take place in the atom.

Inside the stars, where the temperature may reach a "scorching" 20 million degrees centigrade, thermonuclear reactions are constantly at work changing hydrogen into helium. The University of Chicago's Dr. Otto Struve, head of the 42-man U.S. delegation, repeated a solemn prediction: in 3 billion years some stars will have burned up most of their hydrogen, leaving the helium "as 'ashes' of this stupendous nuclear transformation furnace."

Hydrogen and its helium "ashes," while by far the most abundant, are not the only chemical elements which can be detected by sharp-eyed astronomers. The "main sequence" stars have, identically the same-composition as the sun: for every atom of any metal there are some six atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, 500 atoms of helium, and 5,000 atoms of hydrogen (still to be burned). The same proportions of atoms exist in the near vacuum of interstellar space. Not only do the universe's largest bodies behave in much the same fashion as its smallest atoms; its densest matter has the same basic composition as its most dilute matter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.