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Show Keeping Up WifiScien:e qy d cjence er vjee Science Service. WNU Service. Twenty Billion Years Is Age of Universe, Scientist Declares Harvard Findings Differ With British Estimate CAMBRIDGE, MASS. The universe is not so old after all. Flatly contradicting Sir James Jeans' figure of ten million times a million years for the age of the universe, Dr. Bart J. Bok of the Harvard college observatory observa-tory has found that number approximately approx-imately five hundred times too high. Twenty Jjillion years Is the upper limit of the age of the universe, as viewed by Doctor Bok. Jeans' long time scale does not fit . with the evidence of star clusters, with the known facts of the rotation of the Milky Way system or with the existing ex-isting theories of the creation of the spiral nebulae. Nor does it explain ex-plain the existence in the same star cluster of "young" red giant stars and of "old" dwarf stars. "The giants with their tremendous tremen-dous energy output can hardly have existed for much longer than 10,-000,000 10,-000,000 years, unless we wish to make the as yet unfounded hypothesis hypothe-sis that the energy radiated away Is being replenished In some unknown un-known fashion from surrounding space," Doctor Bok- said. A Stellar Catastrophe. "We found It unlikely," he concluded, con-cluded, "that the observed clusters have existed for more than twenty billion years as groups of stars. Lemaltre's theory of the expanding universe Indicates that a catastrophe catastro-phe took place a few billion years ago, and It is tempting to place the origins of the stars and stellar systems sys-tems at the epoch of this catastrophe." catas-trophe." Hundreds of star clusters. Including Includ-ing the well known Pleiades, Hy-ades, Hy-ades, and Taurus, would now be on the verge of disintegrating all at once, torn apart by the gravitating forces of the Milky Way, If they had been in existence as long as Jeans believes, Doctor Bok has found. How Age Is Figured. "In the course of their development develop-ment these clusters must have wandered wan-dered through widely different parts of our galaxy, but In spite of this, under Jeans' long time scale we would find them ready to disintegrate, disinte-grate, cosmically speaking, simultaneously," simul-taneously," he said. 'Tn other words If we were to take our observations at a future epoch removed from the present by only half a per cent of the total supposed age of our galaxy, no sign of them would be left. "It seems absurd to assume that several hundred clusters, all of which had presumably considerable mass and density at the time of their birth, would be observed simultaneously si-multaneously on the verge of disintegration disin-tegration in a galaxy for which the conditions that determine the rate of disintegration will be apt to vary from point to point." |