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Show No Explanation Offered for Planet Mystery- Astronomers of the late Nineteenth Nine-teenth and early Twentieth centuries cen-turies spent some 40 years disproving disprov-ing the discovery of a new planet between Mercury and the sun, writes Dr. Heber D. Curtis, director of the University of Michigan observatories, ob-servatories, in an article in the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review. Re-view. During the total eclipse of 1878, says Dr. Curtis, two bright, starlike star-like objects near the sun were observed ob-served by Michigan's Prof. James Craig Watson, one of America's leading astronomers and, according to former President James B. An-gell, An-gell, the most brilliant man ever graduated from the University of Michigan. The existence of a planet inside the orbit of Mercury had long been predicted by theoretical astronomers, as-tronomers, he writes, although the body had never been seen. Watson's Wat-son's observations, therefore, he j says, were heralded as the discovery discov-ery of a new member of our planetary plan-etary family. Confirming Watson's discovery, he adds, were the rb-sorvations rb-sorvations of Prof. Lewis Swift, who ,,;lt one of the bodies only a few seconds later than Watson during 1 ti-.e same eclipse. 1 N"jt until the observations cf the total eclipse of 1918 did scientists give up Watson's discovery as a mistake, although no one had ever been able again to observe either of his two intramercurial bodies. During each eclipse from 1878 until that time, astronomers set up and ran intramercurial cameras in the search for Vulcan, as the "theoretical" "theoret-ical" planet had been named. "These famous observations of Watson's," Dr. Curtis asserts, "defy any satisfactory explanation. Perhaps Per-haps as probable a theory as any is that he saw a moderately bright comet with an almost stellar nucleus." nu-cleus." The relative strong illumination illumi-nation of the sky background, he explains, would have prevented the detection of a tail, while the failure of astronomers to find the comet after it had left the immediate vicinity vicin-ity of the sun is explained by the fact that all comets enormously decrease de-crease in brilliance as they leave the sun. and a small one observed near the sun might never be seen aiinin because its li'ht would diminish di-minish by hundreds of times wilbin a fhort time. While this theory may exv-lain one of Watson's intramercurial intramer-curial objects, says Dr. Curtis, no explanation has been o.fen.cJ for the other |