APPOINT DIRECTOR OF COLLEGE OBSERVATORY

Dr. Harlow Shapley, formerly of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory at Pasadena, California, whose researches on the size and structure of the stellar universe have attracted widespread attention among astronomers, has been appointed Director of the College Observatory, and thus assumes a position which has been vacant since the death of Professor E. C. Pickering '65 in 1919.

Dr. Shapley is thirty-five years old. He was born at Nashville, Missouri, studied at the University of Missouri, received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Princeton, where he worked under Professor H. N. Russell, and from 1914 until last spring was attached to the Mount Wilson Observatory. During the past eight months he has been a member of the University staff with the title of Observer.

Studied Great Star-Clusters

At Mount Wilson he perfected methods of measuring star distances photometrically, and applied these methods to the problem of the distances and structures of the great star-clusters. His work has given astronomers a new perception of the size of the stellar universe, showing that in volume it is at least a thousand times larger than it was thought to be before the distances to the clusters were measured. Furthermore, Dr. Shapley has discovered that the sun, instead of being at the center of the sidereal universe, as was formerly supposed, is really several hundred quadrillion miles away from it.

Dr. Shapley's studies of the famous star-cluster in Hercules known as "Messier 13" have proved that this cluster has a diameter of more than two and a half quadrillion miles, and contains probably more than fifty thousand stars, each of them intrinsically brighter than the sun. His researches have also played a large part in establishing the fact that the great star-clusters are found only at immense distances from the plane of the galaxy, or Milky Way, but appear to be falling into it. Dr. Shapley's hypothesis is that the Milky Way itself may be composed of former star-clusters which have dissolved.

Dr. Shapley is also known as an entomologist, and has done some interesting work in investigating the ants of the California mountains. He discovered, for instance, that the speed at which these creatures move depends on the temperature, and that for some species the time of running through a "speed-trap", as shown by the stop-watch, gives the temperature of the surrounding air within one degree. He found that the ants went twelve times as fast at 100 degrees as at 50 degrees.

Special Work of Observatory

The special work of the Observatory, developed under Professor Pickering, who served as its director for 42 years and was instrumental in giving it its present standing in the astronomical world, has dealt with the collection of data on the brightness of the stars, the spectra of the stars, the variable stars, and the globular clusters.

Professor Solon I. Bailey '88, who has been associated with the Harvard Observatory for more than thirty years and has been its Acting Director since the death of Professor Pickering, expects to leave Cambridge within a few months for Arequips, Peru, to take charge of the University's South American astronomical station and place it again on a productive basis after a period of dormancy due to war conditions. The Peruvian observatory was largely built up by Professor Bailey, and upon his return to South America he will resume his observations on the variable stars in southern clusters.