Patrick Moore, well known for his astronomy popularisation programmes, had the longest monthly TV series on the BBC called Sky at Night, which ran from 1958 till 2012. Naturally, he had a number of stories to tell. Here are some of them.
In the year 1962, in the Haute Provence Observatory in France, two astronomers were observing the spectrum of a dwarf star. Suddenly they discovered bright spectral lines which could arise from flares due to the element potassium. Now potassium flares are unheard of in dwarf stars. So they wrote about it in a research journal and their work generated considerable interest. However, when other astronomers tried to repeat the observation they could not get that flare. So what was the reason? The mystery was resolved some five years later by another group of astronomers from the University of California. It seems that during the observation, one of the French astronomers had lit a cigarette with a matchstick. The light of the match got into the spectroscope they were using and so the “flare” was seen. And potassium came not from the star but from the match, of course!
I used to share a breakfast table with Graham Smith from the famous radio observatory at Jodrell Bank near Manchester, when we were attending the 1991 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. One morning Graham Smith was in a state of suppressed excitement. The reason, as it turned out was that a team of observers at Jodrell had discovered what would be the first planet around a star other than the Sun. The star was not an ordinary one but a pulsar which is a highly compact neutron star. A typical neutron star would have a radius of only 40-50 km compared to the Sun which has a radius of around 700,000 km. Thus it was strange that the star with the planet should be so unusual. It also transpired that the planet had a period of revolution of half a year; the Earth has a period of revolution of one year.
Moore, who was also present at the announcement, suspected that the observations may simply be the result of observing the pulsar from the moving platform of the Earth. Sure enough, later in the year the Jodrell observers retracted the result for a reason somewhat similar though more technical. In short, the planet claimed was non-existent but the result of incomplete data analysis. As it happened, a real extrasolar planet was discovered in 1992. Today we know of over a thousand such planets.
Moore was invited to the Soviet satellite launch site, Baiknour, when the space station Mir was to dock with a satellite, Progress-7. Two cosmonauts were on board Mir. Moore saw the very impressive take off by Progress. He did not stay till the docking took place. Back in England he learnt that there was some problem and docking did not happen. What he did not realise was that the situation was touch and go. For, as the docking satellite approached, the ground controller realised that it was moving too fast and would collide with Mir.
As the motions of both the vehicles were computer controlled, the ground controller decided to override the computer and fire rockets on Progress so it would bypass Mir. By this time the two were separated by 60 feet and a timely action led Progress to safely pass Mir at 40 feet. Had they collided, the cosmonauts would not have survived.
A related matter is of space debris. In 1991, astronauts in the US shuttle Discovery ran into a possible hazard. They encountered space junk in the form of an abandoned Soviet rocket, from around 1977. The trouble with space debris like this is that unlike ground debris, it does not stay at rest but moves around the Earth at 25,000-30,000 km per hour. Thus, collision with it would be very destructive. There is now increasing awareness of this problem which needs to be controlled in the light of ever increasing use of space.
In the Eighties, Nasa performed an experiment of placing tomato seeds in the upper atmosphere to see what happens to them under cosmic radiation. Some 12-and-a-half million seeds were to orbit the Earth for 10 months before they were brought down and distributed to several schools for examination. But in practice various delays meant that they came down in 1990, some six years later. Somewhat late in the experiment it was realised that the seeds might be contaminated and their fruit unsafe to humans. Belated attempts were made to get the schools to destroy all items relating to that experiment. For instance, in England, the ministry of agriculture ordered that every tomato must be burnt and its pot and soil destroyed. In short, panic reaction led to destruction of a scientific experiment!
Finally, here is a gem I heard from Moore direct. He was much in demand by BBC television as an interviewer of visiting scientists. Once he was summoned to interview a Russian who understood but could not speak English. “But I can’t speak Russian!” exclaimed Moore. The BBC asked him to manage somehow. So Moore would ask a question in English which the Russian replied in his language. Then Moore would tell the gist of what he may have said, using pure guesswork. The interview went on for half-an-hour at the end of which Moore shook hands with the Russian and left.
Back home he was dreading receiving phone calls from the BBC or from people in England who knew Russian, complaining against the trick he had played, and any misinterpretation. Fortunately no one called and so he was assured that his bluff had worked.
The writer, a renowned astrophysicist, is professor emeritus at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune University Campus
