Astronomy for Amateurs Part 13

Noteworthy also was the comet of 1858 (Fig. 49), discovered at Florence by Donati. Its tail extended to a length of 90,000,000 kilometers (55,900,000 miles), and its nucleus had a diameter of at least 900 kilometers (559 miles). It is a curious coincidence that the wine was remarkably excellent and abundant in that year also.

The comet of 1861 almost rivaled the preceding.

Coggia's Comet, in 1874, was also remarkable for its brilliancy, but was very inferior to the last two. Finally, the latest worthy of mention appeared in 1882. This magnificent comet also touched the Sun, traveling at a speed of 480 kilometers (299 miles) per second. It crossed the gaseous atmosphere of the orb of day, and then continued its course through infinity. On the day of, and that following, its perihelion, it could be detected with the unaided eye in full daylight, enthroned in the Heavens beside the dazzling solar luminary. For the rest, it was neither that of 1858 nor of 1861.

Since 1882 we have not been favored with a visit from any fine comet; but we are prepared to give any such a reception worthy of their magnificence: first, because now that we have fathomed them we are no longer awestruck; second, because we would gladly study them more closely.

In short, these hirsute stars, whose fantastic appearance impressed the imagination of our ancestors so vividly, are no longer formidable. Their ma.s.s is inconsiderable; they seem to consist mainly of the lightest of gases. a.n.a.lysis of their incandescence reveals a spectrum closely resembling that of many nebulae; the presence of carbon is more particularly obvious. Even the nucleus is not solid, and is often transparent.

It is fair to say that the action of a comet might be deleterious if one of these orbs were to arrive directly upon us. The transformation of motion into heat, and the combination of the cometary gases with the oxygen of our atmosphere might produce a conflagration, or a general poisoning of the atmosphere.

But the collision of a comet with a planet is almost an impossibility.

This phenomenon could only occur if the comet crossed the planetary orbit at the exact moment at which the planet was pa.s.sing. When we think of the immensity of s.p.a.ce, of the extraordinary length of way traversed by a world in its annual journey round the Sun, and the speed of its rotation, we see why this coincidence is hardly likely to occur.

Thus, among the hundreds of comets catalogued, a few only cut the terrestrial orbit. One of them, that of 1832, traversed the path of our globe in the nights of October 29 and 30 in that year; but the Earth only pa.s.sed the same point thirty days later, and at the critical period was more than 80,000,000 kilometers (50,000,000 miles) away from the comet.

On June 30, 1861, however, the Earth pa.s.sed through the extremity of the tail of the Great Comet of that year. No one even noticed it. The effects were doubtless quite immaterial.

In 1872 we were to collide with Biela's Comet, lost since 1852; now, as we shall presently see, we came with flying colors out of that disagreeable situation, because the comet had disintegrated, and was reduced to powder. So we may sleep in peace as regards future danger likely to come to us from comets. There is little fear of the destruction of humanity by these windy bags.

These ethereal beauties whose blond locks float carelessly upon the azure night are not concerned with us; they seem to have no other preoccupation than to race from sun to sun, visiting new Heavens, indifferent to the astonishment they produce in us. They speed restlessly and tirelessly through infinity; they are the Amazons of s.p.a.ce.

What suns, what worlds must they have visited since the moment of their birth! If these splendid fugitives could relate the story of their wanderings, how gladly should we listen to the enchanting descriptions of the various abodes they have journeyed to! But alas! these mysterious explorers are dumb; they tell none of their secrets, and we must needs respect their enigmatic silence.

Yet, some of them have left us a modest token of remembrance, an almost impalpable nothing, sufficient, however, to enable us to address our thanks to the considerate messenger.

Can there be any one upon the Earth who has not been struck by the phosph.o.r.escent lights that glide through the somber night, leaving a brilliant silver or golden track--the luminous, ephemeral trail of a meteor?

Sometimes, when Night has silently spread the immensity of her wings above the weary Earth, a shining speck is seen to detach itself in the shades of evening from the starry vault, shooting lightly through the constellations to lose itself in the infinitude of s.p.a.ce.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 54.--A Meteor.]

These bewitching sparks attract our eyes and chain our senses.

Fascinating celestial fireflies, their dainty flames dart in every direction through s.p.a.ce, sowing the fine dust of their gilded wings upon the fields of Heaven. They are born to die; their life is only a breath; yet the impression which they make upon the imagination of mortals is of the profoundest.

The young girl dreaming in the delicious tranquillity of the transparent night smiles at this charming sister in the Heavens (Fig. 54). What can not this adorable star announce to the tender and loving heart? Is it the shy messenger of the happiness so long desired? Its unpremeditated appearance fills the soul with a ray of hope and makes it tremble. It is a golden beam that glides into the heart, expanding it in the thrills of a sudden and ephemeral pleasure.... The radiant meteor seems to quit the velvet of the deep blue sky to respond to the appeal of the imploring voice that seeks its succor.

What secrets has it not surprised! And who bears malice against it? It is the friend of the betrothed who invoke its pa.s.sage to confide their wishes, and a.s.sociate it with their dreams. Tradition holds that if a wish be formulated during the visible pa.s.sage of a meteor it will certainly be fulfilled before the year is out. Between ourselves, however, this is but a surviving figment of the ancestral imagination, for this celestial jewel takes no such active part in the doings of Humanity.... Besides, try to express a wish distinctly in a second!

It is a curious fact that while comets have so often spread terror on the Earth, shooting stars should on the contrary have been regarded with benevolent feelings at all times. And what is a shooting star? These dainty excursionists from the celestial sh.o.r.es are not, as is supposed, true stars. They are atoms, nothings, minute fragments deriving in general from the disintegration of comets. They come to us from a vast distance, from millions on millions of miles, and circle in swarms around the Sun, following a very elongated ellipse which closely resembles that of the cometary orbit. Their flight is extremely rapid, reaching sometimes more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) per second, a cometary speed that is, as we have seen, greatly above that of our terrestrial vehicle, which amounts to 29 to 30 kilometers (about 19 miles).

These little corpuscles are not intrinsically luminous; but when the orbit of a swarm of meteors crosses our planet, a violent shock arises, the speed of which may be as great as 72 kilometers (45 miles) in the first second if we meet the star shower directly; the average rate, however, does not exceed 30 to 40 kilometers (19 to 25 miles), for these meteors nearly always cross our path obliquely. The height at which they arrive is usually 110 kilometers (68 miles), and 80 kilometers (50 miles) at the moment of disappearance of the meteor; but shooting stars have been observed at 300 kilometers (186 miles).

The friction caused by this collision high up in the atmosphere transforms the motion into heat. The molecules incandesce, and burn like true stars with a brilliancy that is often magnificent.

But their glory is of short duration. The excessive heat resulting from the shock consumes the poor firefly; its remains evaporate, and drop slowly to the Earth, where they are deposited on the surface of the soil in a sort of ferruginous dust mixed with carbon and nickel. Some one hundred and forty-six milliards of them reach us annually, as seen by the unaided eye, and many more in the telescope; the effect of these showers of meteoric matter is an insensible increase in the ma.s.s of our globe, a slight lessening of its rotary motion, and the acceleration of the lunar movements of revolution.

Although the appearance of shooting stars is a common enough phenomenon, visible every night of the year, there are certain times when they arrive in swarms, from different quarters of the sky. The most remarkable dates in this connection are the night of August 10th and the morning of November 14th. Every one knows the shooting stars of August 10th, because they arrive in the fine warm summer evenings so favorable to general contemplation of the Heavens. The phenomenon lasts till the 12th, and even beyond, but the maximum is on the 10th. When the sky is very clear, and there is no moon, hundreds of shooting stars can be counted on those three nights, sometimes thousands. They all seem to come from the same quarter of the Heavens, which is called the _radiant_, and is situated for the August swarm in the constellation of Perseus, whence they have received the name of _Perseids_. Our forefathers also called them the tears of St. Lawrence, because the feast of that saint is on the same date. These shooting stars describe a very elongated ellipse, and their orbit has been identified with that of the Great Comet of 1862.

The shower of incandescent asteroids on November 14th is often much more abundant than the preceding. In 1799, 1833, and 1866, the meteors were so numerous that they were described as showers of rain, especially on the first two dates. For several hours the sky was furrowed with falling stars. An English mariner, Andrew Ellicot, who made the drawing we reproduce (Fig. 55), described the phenomenon as stupendous and alarming (November 12, 1799, 3 A.M.). The same occurred on November 13, 1833. The meteors that scarred the Heavens on that night were reckoned at 240,000.

These shooting stars received the name of _Leonids_, because their radiant is situated in the constellation of the Lion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 55.--Shooting Stars of November 12, 1799.

_From a contemporary drawing._]

This swarm follows the same orbit as the comet of 1866, which travels as far as Ura.n.u.s, and comes back to the vicinity of the Sun every thirty-three years. Hence we were ent.i.tled to expect another splendid apparition in 1899, but the expectations of the astronomers were disappointed. All the preparations for the appropriate reception of these celestial visitors failed to bring about the desired result. The notes made in observatories, or in balloons, admitted of the registration of only a very small number of meteors. The maximum was thirteen. During that night, some 200 shooting stars were counted. There were more in 1900, 1901, and, above all, in 1902. This swarm has become displaced.

The night of November 27th again is visited by a number of shooting stars that are the disaggregated remains of the Comet of Biela. This comet, discovered by Biela in 1827, accomplished its revolution in six and a half years, and down to 1846 it responded punctually to the astronomers who expected its return as fixed by calculation. But on January 13, 1846, the celestial wanderer broke in half: each fragment went its own way, side by side, to return within sight from the Earth in 1852. It was their last appearance. That year the twin comets could still be seen, though pale and insignificant. Soon they vanished into the depths of night, and never appeared again. They were looked for in vain, and were despaired of, when on November 27, 1872, instead of the shattered comet, came a magnificent rain of shooting stars. They fell through the Heavens, numerous as the flakes of a shower of snow.

The same phenomenon recurred on November 27, 1885, and confirmed the hypothesis of the demolition and disaggregation of Biela's Comet into shooting stars.

There is an immense variety in the brilliancy of the shooting stars, from the weak telescopic sparks that vanish like a flash of lightning, to the incandescent _bolides_ or _fire-b.a.l.l.s_ that explode in the atmosphere.

Fig. 56 shows an example of these, and it represents a fire-ball observed at the Observatory of Juvisy on the night of August 10, 1899.

It arrived from Ca.s.siopeia, and burst in Cepheus.

This phenomenon may occur by day as well as by night. It is often accompanied by one or several explosions, the report of which is sometimes perceptible to a considerable distance, and by a shower of meteorites. The globe of fire bursts, and splits up into luminous fragments, scattered in all directions. The different parts of the fire-ball fall to the surface of the Earth, under the name of aerolites, or rather of uranoliths, since they arrive from the depths of s.p.a.ce, and not from our atmosphere.

From the most ancient times we hear of showers of uranoliths to which popular superst.i.tions were attached; and the Greeks even gave the name of _Sideros_ to iron, the first iron used having been sidereal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 56.--Fire-Ball seen from the Observatory at Juvisy, August 10, 1899.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 57.--Explosion of a Fire-Ball above Madrid, February 10, 1896.]

No year pa.s.ses without the announcement of several showers of uranoliths, and the phenomenon sometimes causes great alarm to those who witness it. One of the most remarkable explosions is that which occurred above Madrid, February 10, 1896, a fragment from which, sent me by M.

Arcimis, Director of the Meteorological Inst.i.tute, fell immediately in front of the National Museum (Fig. 57). The phenomenon occurred at 9.30 A.M., in brilliant sunshine. The flash of the explosion was so dazzling that it even illuminated the interior of the houses; an alarming clap of thunder was heard seventy seconds after, and it was believed that an explosion of dynamite had occurred. The fire-ball burst at a height of fourteen miles, and was seen as far as 435 miles from Madrid!

In one of Raphael's finest pictures (_The Madonna of Foligno_) a fire-ball may be seen beneath a rainbow (Fig. 58), the painter wishing to preserve the remembrance of it, as it fell near Milan, on September 4, 1511. This picture dates from 1512.

The dimensions of these meteorites vary considerably; they are of all sizes, from the impalpable dust that floats in the air, to the enormous blocks exposed in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Many of them weigh several million pounds. That represented below fell in Mexico during the shower of meteors of November 27, 1885. It weighed about four pounds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 58.--Raphael's Fire-Ball (_The Madonna of Foligno_).]

These bolides and uranoliths come to us from the depths of s.p.a.ce; but they do not appear to have the same origin as the shooting stars. They may arise from worlds destroyed by explosion or shock, or even from planetary volcanoes. The lightest of them may have been expelled from the volcanoes of the Moon. Some of the most ma.s.sive, in which iron predominates, may even have issued from the bowels of the Earth, projected into s.p.a.ce by some volcanic explosion, at an epoch when our globe was perpetually convulsed by cataclysms of extraordinary violence.

They return to us to-day after being removed from the Earth to distances proportional to the initial speed imparted to them. This origin seems the more admissible as the stones that fall from the skies exhibit a mineral composition identical with that of the terrestrial materials.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 59.--A Uranolith.]

In any case, these uranoliths bring us back at least by their fall to our Earth, and from henceforward we will remain upon it, to study its position in s.p.a.ce, and to take account of the place it fills in the Universe, and of the astronomical laws that govern our destiny.