Evening star., 1950-09-15
Stors Still Being Born,
Princeton Expert Finds
Created Of Cosmic Clouds,
Dr.. Splitter Reports
By Thomos R. Henry
Stars still are being born.

Stars still are being born.
Such, at least, was the case In The
recent astronomical past OF only few
hundred million years, according to
DR.. Lyman Splitter, jr, director of the
Princeton University Observatory. in a
report just published by the Smithsonian
Institution.
These new stars, he holds, are cre-
ated out of flying cosmic clouds. far
more tenuous than the finest vacuum
ever created on earth.
Points to Two Clues.
There are he says, two clues One
is that afforded by supergiant stars.
A few of these stand out like search
lights among the billions of lesser stars
composing the Milky Way galaxy. Such
stars are extremely hot. They radiate
light and heat at a rate 10000 times
that of the sun. This means they are
burning up very rapidly. They hardly
can have existed more than 100 million
years.
The second clue is that all these
stars are found in regions of tie sky
where there are great gas clouAs-ag-
gregations of individual atoms and
infinitesimally minute particles. They
have been detected nowhere else in
creation-neither in the Milky Way
galaxy itself nor in any of the other
galaxieS millions of light years distant.
The clouds are extremely hot, which
indicates that the atoms and particles
in them must be moving very rapidly.
Under such conditions two great
forces come into play. One is gravity.
1t pulls the minute particles together
to form Jumps. About 10000 such
particles hardly would form a mass the
size of the head of pin.
A vastly greater force than that Of
gravity is the pressure of light from
the surrounding stars striking the
particles from all directions and tend
ing to push them together.
In period of about 10 million years,
DR.. Splitter estimates, a fairly dense
cloud, through which little light pene-
trates, is formed. It is a turbulent
cloud. full of cyclonic winds due to
the rotation of the earth and the
differences in temperature. These tend
to tear some of the clouds apart.
But in most of the clouds the forces
tending to pull the particles and Jumps"
together remain dominant until finally
dense mass of gas is formed. This is
known as globule or proto-star. Such
globule of gas is about a light year or
billion miles in diameter. This is small
for cosmic cloud, but far larger than
any star.
Several Discovered.
Several such objects have been dis
covered scattered through the universe,
DR.. Splitter says. Eventually, by mech
anisms still obscure, the globule con-
denses to form a giant star. Observa-
tions now are in progress at observa-
tories throughout the world to throw
further light on this phenomenon, he
emphasizes.
Otherwise, DR.. Splitter afirms, it now
is generally agreed that the galaxy as
whole, and in anything approaching
its present form. cannot be much more
than billion years old. There also is
reason to believe that there has not
been much change in the state of most
OF the stars since the beginning. Only
those with extremely high rates of
radiation will have been materially
changed.
What happened about billion years
ago to bring this galaxy, and probably
most OF the other galaxies as well, into
being remains complete mystery to
astronomers. There is no clue to con-
dltlons further in the past.