Measuring Earth's Motion

Astronomers have long known pre cisely how fast the earth moves as it cir cles around its own star, the sun (66,500 m.p.h.), and how fast the solar system revolves around the core of its own galaxy, the Milky Way (481,000 m.p.h.).

They have even been able to compute the astounding speed with which the Milky Way moves around the center of a supercluster of 2,500 neighboring galaxies (1,350,000 m.p.h.). Yet the earth and the Milky Way are also in motion with respect to the vast reaches of the universe itself.*

While scientists have often speculated about this universal speed, they have never been able to record or measure it. For one thing, they lacked a suitable frame of reference in which they could clock the earth's speed through the universe as a whole. Now, a young Stanford University astronomer has made such a computation by using a phenomenon so distant in origin that it can be considered at the very outer limits of the cosmos. He calculates that along with the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, the earth is hurtling through space at 360,000 m.p.h.

As his celestial speedometer, Dr. Edward K. Conklin, 27, used the faint field of high-frequency radiation that seems to blanket all parts of the heavens. These scattered signals, first detected by scientists of the Bell Telephone Laboratories four years ago, may well be the remnants of the primordial flash that, according to many astronomers, gave birth to the universe more than 10 billion years ago. Just as a cyclist feels more of a breeze when he rides with the wind in his face rather than at his back, the lingering radiation from the so-called "big bang" would appear slightly stronger to an observer on earth when the planet is moving toward the radio waves. Conklin figured that if he could somehow determine the apparent excess of radiation caused by the earth's own motion, he could, in fact, then measure the motion itself.

Expanding Universe. Conklin set up two small radio telescope antennas at the University of California's White Mountain Research Station, atop a 12,500-ft. peak near Yosemite National Park, and pointed them in opposite directions. For 23 days, the antennas swept different quadrants of the skies; periodically they were reversed to reduce the risk of built-in electronic error. By comparing the slight variations in readings, Conklin was able to calculate the earth's velocity toward the distant sea of radiation.

He may also have found possible confirmation of the "big bang" theory. If the universe had indeed been born in a cataclysmic explosion eons ago, it would still be expanding in all directions. Despite their continued drift away from the original blast, the individual parts of the universe would remain in approximately the same position in relation to one another -- much like the lettering on the surface of an expanding balloon. That, says Conklin, is the pattern of galactic movement indicated by his observations.

Although the earth is in motion in relation to the distant sea of radiation, he explains, ihe movement can be accounted for almost entirely by combining all the other known motions of the earth, sun and Milky Way. But when these motions are combined with Conklin's new universal speed for the earth, they tend to cancel each other out. As a result the supercluster appears almost stationary within the incomprehensibly larger framework of the universe -- which, Conklin adds, is exactly as the supercluster should appear under the "big bang" theory.

* One indication of just how vast those reaches are: even at 481,000 m.p.h., it takes the sun and its planets about 200 million years to make a single revolution around the axis of the Milky Way.

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