Observatory Receives Many Replies To Appeal For Meteor Reports--Millman Reveals Significance of Astral Nomads

The Harvard Observatory has received over thirty letters in answer to their announcement requesting all who saw the brilliant meteor in the southwestern sky last Wednesday night to write in details concerning size, shape, color, tail, duration of light, and accompanying noise. The notice even evoked a letter from Los Angeles describing an astral visitor, but since meteors are never visible until within 100 miles of the earth when there is sufficient atmosphere to afford combustion and the curvature of the earth is approximately seven inches for every mile, the meteor could not have been the one that P. M. Millman 2G, graduate student of Astronomy descerned low on the horizon.

For the last few years the Observatory has been conducting special investigations to discover more about these bodies which are the only tangible evidence we have of the nature of solar and stellar matter. At the direction of Dr. Harlow Shapley, Paine Professor of Astronomy and under the immediate supervision of Dr. Ernest J. Opik, Lecturer in Astrophysics, several Harvard men are working at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona on meteors, and have attempted through the newspapers to secure all possible information about these celestial nomads.

Millman is at work on a thesis concerned with meteors. He attributed the greenish light of the meteor to a large magnesium content which in a vaporized state brought about by the intense heat of friction combines with atoms of the rarified air to form an incandescent gas cap rushing before the meteor.

"The speed with which a meteor enters the stratosphere," Millman remarked, "tells whether it came from solar or interstellar space. The average speed of a meteor is 40 miles a second. Those coming toward the earth with a greater velocity are apparently from outside the solar system.

"The meteor which I observed was of the approximate brilliancy of Venus, greater than a first magnitude star. It did not belong to any one of the showers that the earth encounters in the round of its orbit, like the Leonids which illuminate the skies near the end of November or the Persoids which may be seen in great numbers during August."

Meteors are of two types, the metallic and the stony. The stony, type rarely fall to earth but there are many examples of the metallic type which are often so large that they are not oxidized by the time they penetrate the earth's layer of atmosphere. The meteorite discovered by Admiral Peary on his North Pole Expedition in 1909 is of the metallic type, composed of 95 per cent iron and a small amount of nickel. The Tent. as it is called because of its peculiar shape, weighs over 36 tons. A celestial visitor almost twice as large has been dug out of a hole in South Africa. Although expeditions have been trying to discover some fragments of the object that caused the huge pit known as Meteor Crater in Arizona they have not been successful.

Despite the fact that there is no authorized record of a man being killed by a meteor, such a shower bombarded the earth at a desolate spot in Siberia in 1909 that wild life has not yet returned. Within a radius of 300 miles from the point where the meteor struck trees were blown down by force of the air pressure. The fall was recorded as an earthquake disturbance on the seismograph at the University of Moscow and even on the Ferdham University instrument.