Abstract
IT is only with some qualms that an outsider can enter into the discussion of questions of stellar structure, but I feel that Sir James Jeans is speaking more favourably of Prof. Milne's theory than he thinks when he says that it contains little that has not been anticipated either by Sir Arthur Eddington or by himself.1 A theory that will combine the good points of Eddington's and Jeans's theories is precisely what observers of the progress of astrophysics have long wished to see. Jeans requires a liquid interior to explain binary fission; Eddington says that owing to ionisation the gas laws must hold through most of the interior. Eddington, assuming that the gas laws hold throughout the interior, infers the mass-luminosity relation, which is verified by observation except for the adjustment of a single constant. Neither theory appears to account for the facts explained by the other, and there must be something that both authors have overlooked. It seems to me that the chief recommendation of Prof. Milne's method of attack is that it foreshadows a means of finding out what this is.
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NATURE, Jan. 17, p. 89.
Mon. Not. Roy. Ast. Soc., Nov. 1930.
Ann. d. Chimie et d. Physique, 23, 62–144, 1900; also James Thomson, "Collected Papers", p. 136.
Cf. A. R. Low, NATURE, 115, 300; 1925.
Quart. Jour. Math., 1, 1–20; 1930.
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JEFFREYS, H. Stellar Structure. Nature 127, 162 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127162a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/127162a0
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