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Show Experts Trace Faint Red Stars Faded Suns, Perhaps 1C1 of Thsm, Seen in Eight Ysp.rz' Search of Sky. EVANSTOM, ILL. For eight years astronomers at Northwestern university have photographed and studied the sl.y in a quiet hunt for elusive celestial bodies known as faint red stars. The other afternoon Dr. Oliver J. Lee, director of the university's Dearborn observatory, revealed a partial result of this search in announcing an-nouncing the discovery of 56 new faint red stars and the probable discovery dis-covery of 45 others. He reported this discovery before the annual meeting of the American Astronomical society in Philadelphia. Philadel-phia. Red But Not Hot. Only 55 such stars had previously been known in those zones of the sky, located in the Milky way, which were investigated by Dr. Lee and his associates, Ralph B. Baldwin, Bald-win, David W. Hamlin, and Richard F. Kinnaird. The particular types of stars studied are known as classes R and N in the Draper classification. They are red in color, low in temperature, tempera-ture, and have spectra characterized by bands of carbon and cyanogen. Scientists are agreed that stars are constantly radiating away tremendous tre-mendous quantities of energy. Such a condition should result in their losing their luminosity, becoming in fact dead suns of the universe, small in size and relatively low in temperature. If such is the case, there should be great numbers of small stars of low temperature, like class R and N stars, even in our own region of the galactic system. Reason to Expect More. Heretofore astronomers have observed ob-served relatively few of such stars. The results of the present investigation investi-gation therefore seem to prove that the number of such faint red stars in the universe is considerably greater than our present knowledge would indicate. The region of the sky selected for the investigation in scientific terminology ter-minology centered at 0 degrees, plus 9 degrees, and plus 18 degrees . of declination to a magnitude of N.5. This represents an area about as large as one-third of the whole hemisphere hemi-sphere of the sky visible at any one time. A star of magnitude 11.5 is only l-200th as bright as the faintest star visible to the naked eye. In the course of the study more than 100,000 stars were photographed photo-graphed and examined. Of these, 111 were positively identified as faint red stars o classes R or N. The Northwestern astronomers listed list-ed with a question mark 45 others which they believe will prove to be of types R and N when they are observed by more powerful instruments instru-ments than those of Dearborn observatory. ob-servatory. The paper read at Philadelphia by Dr. Lee presented findings which are only a part of a much broader investigation on which he and his associates have been engaged since 1932. This is a spectrographic survey sur-vey of the whole sky, designed to classify all faint red stars up to a magnitude of 11.5. |