"The Sun One of the Relatively Small Stars in Milky War"--Shapley

The Sun is One of the lesser relatively small stars in the Milky Way. So Professor Harlow Shapely, director of the Harvard University Observatory told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at its 1929 convention, at New York.

There are approximately 30,000,000,000 stars in this home circle, arranged in what Dr. Shapley called a discoidal system, the general shape of this star mass being that of a thin watch, or of two plates held together face to face. Studies of the last year indicate that the diameter of our galaxy is 200,000 light years, a light years, a light year being 6,000,000,000,000 miles.

It has been established by foreign astronemers, according to Shapley, that this star mass turns around and around like a grindstone, completing a circle once every 300,000,000 years. The earth is a distance of 50,000 light years from the hub of this wheel of stars. The hub or center of gravity of the mass is in the southern constellation Sagittarius, where a dense swarm of stars is located.

Super-Universe

The ten billions stars is these parts, however, form only a very trifling parts of the universe, as it is now unfolding before the researches of Shapley and others engaged in taking soundings in from stars which are traveling outwardly, or away from the earth, are broadened; and this effect is used as a speedometer in telling how fast the stars were traveling.

Determine Speed

Used on a distant nebula, this speedometer indicated that it was traveling at the rate of 2,500 miles an unheard-of rate of speed even for astronomy. Mathematicians worked over this and other results to prove that the distant nebulae are in some manner tangled up in the outer folds of the universe, so that their light waves are being broadened by the Einstein effect rather than by their speed.

Every wave length of light from these greatest distances was broadened--the greater the distance the greater the broadening. The wave lengths of light spread. The natural partiality of astronmers for the home galaxy formerly exaggerated its importance, but it is now known to be merely one of many thousands of equally interesting galaxies. In the past year, Shapley said, several thousand new galaxies have been discovered at Harvard alone.

These galaxies are not independent organizations, but are merely units in larger organizations which he called galaxies of galaxies. The nearest of these galaxies, he said, is eleven million light years from here. It is situated in the constellation of Coma and Virgo. It contains about 250 constituent galaxies. These are galaxies of a dwarf type. They apparently measure only from five to twenty thousand light years in diameter.

Plot New Galaxies

Forty-five separate clouds of galaxies have been studies at Harvard during the last few years. Some contain only a few galaxies, other contain several hundred. Observation seems to show that the universe is closed; that every part of it is related by the force of gravity or the Einstein space effect. It was found that the light from the distant nebulae varied from that no earth.