Monday, Jun. 01, 1942
Once Upon A Time
Before the stars--before even the 92 separate elements were formed, what was the universe like?
> The material of the universe was a single clump of tight-packed sub-atomic particles--so tightly packed, in fact, that material equivalent to the present mass of the earth would barely have filled one of the present earth's good-sized gravel pits.
> A lump of this material the size of a sugar cube weighed about half a billion tons.*
> Temperature of this compact pre-stellar universe was well over 8,000,000,000DEG centigrade.
These are the conclusions of a small, soft-spoken Hindu astrophysicist, Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the University of Chicago. Born in Lahore 32 years ago, he is a graduate of Madras and Cambridge Universities, a nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Raman, who won a Nobel Prize (1930) for his studies on diffusion of light.
Evidence for Chandrasekhar's picture of the primordial universe, published in the Astrophysical Journal, is abstrusely mathematical. It depends on such data as 1) the relative abundance of the isotopes (variant forms) of the elements, 2) the relative quantities of the elements themselves throughout the universe, 3) the relations among the fundamental particles--protons, neutrons, etc.--of which the elements are composed.
Stars From An Egg. Chandrasekhar's inspiration was the "expanding universe'' theory of Belgium's Canon Georges Lemaitre, who eleven years ago suggested that all the matter in the universe was once condensed into a single primordial atom--"Lemaitre's egg," as genial scientists call it.
Somehow this egg burst, spattering stars and whirling nebulae in all directions while matter broke down into simpler & simpler forms. ("We are still in time to see this wonder-world," said Lemaitre, "for we still have radium that has not completely extinguished into dull substances like lead and helium.")
Lemaitre's own calculations were rather inconclusive. So now Chandrasekhar's figures are the first impressive support-"in a general way"--for the expanding universe theory. "I believe Canon Lemaitre would be pleased with what I have found," said Chandrasekhar last week. He has not heard from his good friend since the Nazis swept over Louvain University, where the devout theoretical physicist holds the Chair of Relativity.
But what was the pre-stellar universe before it was an incredibly hot and heavv "egg"--?
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ventures no answer to that one.
* Similar conditions still persist in the interiors of several stars, of which an egg-sized fragment weighs tons.
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