Starry-Eyed

One of the scientific highlights of any year is the Carnegie Institution's annual report on the projects it has underwritten in fields ranging from physics to plant biology. Most eye-popping items in the 1960 report, which was released last week, were the major astronomical findings made by the institution at Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories in California. Among the notable discoveries and newfound mysteries!

P: A picture of the "edge" of the known universe: two apparently colliding galaxies 6 billion light-years away. The most distant impression ever received by man revealed that the giant clusters of galaxies, at least as large as our own Milky Way, were racing away from the earth at 90,000 miles per second, about half the speed of light.

P:A distant group of stars whose light, analyzed by a delicate photometric technique, indicates that they may be 25 billion years old. One probable consequence of the find: drastic revision of previous estimates that the universe is 7.4 billion years old and our solar system a mere 5 billion.

P:Several stars or star clusters showing inexplicably wide deviations in their chemical composition. In some cases, they varied vastly in the amount of lithium and beryllium they contained, and one star (3 Centauri A) contained 100 times more phosphorus than the sun. The discovery poses the still unanswered question: Why do stars have such different contents if, as is generally supposed, they were all formed by similar processes?

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