ASTRONOMICAL ERROR

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In its recent front-page story on astronomer Harlow Shapley (Nov. 6), the CRIMSON completely fumbled its chance to cover accurately one of the most significant astronomical results of the decade.

The CRIMSON story implied that work done in the new filed of radio astronomy has led to a revision of the distances to the galaxies outside outside our own Milky Way system. Only by the weirdest sort of mental gymnastics is there any relation between Harvard's new 25-foot radio telescope (or anybody's radio telescope) and the distance to the galaxies.

Instead, astronomers at Harvard and at Mt. Palomar, gathering evidence with "ordinary" telescopes and re-analyzing old data have shown that classical Cepheid variable star are actually brighter than had been assumed. Knowing the absolute or intrinsic brightness of these particular stars, and from their apparent brightness, astronomers can determine the distances of nearby galaxies. The new results show that these stars are brighter than previously suspected, so that the distances of the galaxies are about twice their older values. Thus the part of the universe that astronomers have probed has about eight times the volume they had thought.

The CRIMSON story barely hinted at the effect of this result. But doubling the size of the known universe the expansion is doubled. Now by computing backwards, the age of the universe becomes about six billion year, somewhat more in line with geological results from radioactivity of rocks in the Laurentian Shield.

Research with the new radio telescopes promises to be equally exciting, but that is a completely different story. We hope that the CRIMSON coverage of the forthcoming installation of Harvard's radio telescope will be more accurate. Owen Gingerich 2G   Thomas A. Matthews 2G   Harvard College Observatory