Hot Solar Poles?

Because Dr. Albert Einstein is the world's most celebrated living scientist, laymen tend to turn his suggestions into new Einstein theories.* Last week despatches contained accounts of a new Einstein sun theory. While talking with Mt. Wilson Observatory astronomers about cyclones on the sun which sweep clockwise across the southern solar hemisphere, counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, Dr. Einstein suggested that a temperature difference between the sun's poles and equator might be the cause of the solar cyclones. Most probably, he said, the polar regions were warmer than the equatorial regions. Having given out an idea for Mt. Wilson astronomers to ponder, he peered at tiny Planet Eros through the Mt. Wilson telescope (see above), went to Los Angeles as guest of Cinemactor Charles Chaplin to see the opening of City Lights (see p. 24).

Although new as an explanation of sunspots, the theory that stars are hotter at their poles is well known among astronomers. It was first stated in 1923 by Dr. Edward Arthur Milne, Oxford astrophysicist. Dr. Edward Hugo von Zeipel, astronomer of Sweden's University of Uppsala, and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, famed astronomer of Cambridge University, have both worked on the theory.

An able scientist not so well known as Dr. Einstein also said something about the sun last week. Dr. Walter Nernst, director of the Physical Institute of University of Berlin, 1920 Nobel prize winner in Chemistry, reaffirmed the "heat-death" theory of Sir James Hopwood Jeans (TIME, Jan. 5) by announcing that, from his studies in thermodynamics, he believes the sun is growing smaller, is steadily losing mass by radiation. Now only three billion years old, in ten billion years it will have shrivelled to a tiny speck. At that time the cold earth together with the other planets, will no longer be held in their elliptical orbits by gravity, will have wandered off into space.

* Less respectful last week were burglars who broke into Dr. Einstein's summer home at Caputh, Germany, drank his wine, stole a piece of Japanese embroidery.

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