Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies Part 20

The year 1916 was exceptional in providing an abundant and previously unknown shower on June 28, and its stream has nearly the same orbit as that of the Pons-Winnecke periodic comet. Useful observations of meteors are not difficult to make, and they are of service to professional astronomers investigating the orbits of these bodies, among whom are Mitch.e.l.l and Olivier of the University of Virginia.

CHAPTER XLIII

METEORITES

Meteorites, the name for meteors which have actually gone all the way through our atmosphere, are never regular in form or spherical. As a rule the iron meteorites are covered with pittings or thumb marks, due probably to the resistance and impact of the little columns of air which impede its progress, together with the unequal condition and fusibility of their surface material. The work done by the atmosphere in suddenly checking the meteor's velocity appears in considerable part as heat, fusing the exterior to incandescence. This thin liquid sh.e.l.l is quickly brushed off, making oftentimes a luminous train.

But notwithstanding the exceedingly high temperature of the exterior, enforced upon it for the brief time of transit through the atmosphere, it is probable that all large meteorites, if they could be reached at once on striking the earth, would be found to be cold, because the smooth, black, varnishlike crust which always incases them as a result of intense heat is never thick. On one occasion a meteor which was seen to fall in India was dug out of the ground as quickly as possible, and found to be, not hot as was expected, but coated thickly over with ice frozen on it from the moisture in the surrounding soil.

As to the composition of shooting stars, and their probable ma.s.s, and its effect upon the earth, our data are quite insufficient. The lines of sodium and magnesium have been hurriedly caught in the spectroscope, and, estimating on the basis of the light emitted by them, the largest meteors must weigh ounces rather than pounds. Nevertheless, it is interesting to inquire what addition the continual fall of many millions daily upon the earth makes to its weight: somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand tons annually is perhaps a conservative estimate, but even this would not acc.u.mulate a layer one inch in thickness over the entire surface of the earth in less than a thousand million years.

Many hundreds of the meteors actually seen to fall, together with those picked up accidentally, are recovered and prized as specimens of great value in our collections, the richest of which are now in New York, Paris, and London. The detailed investigation of them is rather the province of the chemist, the crystallographer and the mineralogist than of the astronomer whose interest is more keen in their life history before they reach the earth. To distinguish a stony meteorite from terrestrial rock substances is not always easy, but there is usually little difficulty in p.r.o.nouncing upon an iron meteorite. These are most frequently found in deserts, because the dryness of the climate renders their oxidation and gradual disappearance very slow.

The surface of a suspected iron meteorite is polished to a high l.u.s.ter and nitric acid is poured upon it. If it quickly becomes etched with a characteristic series of lines, or a sort of cross-hatching, it is almost certain to be a meteorite. Occasionally carbon has been found in meteorites, and the existence of diamond has been suspected. The minerals composing meteorites are not unlike terrestrial materials of volcanic origin, though many of them are peculiar to meteorites only.

More than one-third of all the known chemical elements have been found by a.n.a.lysis in meteorites, but not any new ones.

Meteoric iron is a rich alloy containing about ten per cent of nickel, also cobalt, tin, and copper in much smaller amount. Calcium, chlorine, sodium, and sulphur likewise are found in meteoric irons. At very high temperatures iron will absorb gases and retain them until again heated to red heat. Carbonic oxide, helium, hydrogen, and nitrogen are thus imprisoned, or occluded, in meteoric irons in very small quant.i.ties; and in 1867, during a London lecture by Graham, a room in the Royal Inst.i.tution was for a brief s.p.a.ce illuminated by gas brought to earth in a meteorite from interplanetary s.p.a.ce. Meteorites, too, have been most critically investigated by the biologist, but no trace of germs of organic life of any type has so far been found. Farrington of Chicago has published a full descriptive catalogue of all the North American meteorites.

Recent investigations of the radioactivity of meteorites show that the average stone meteorite is much less radioactive than the average rock, and probably less than one-fourth as radioactive as in average granite.

The metallic meteorites examined were found about wholly free from radioactivity.

From shooting stars, perhaps the chips of the celestial workshop, or more possibly related to the planetesimals which the processes of growth of the universe have swept up into the vastly greater bodies of the universe, transition is natural to the stars themselves, the most numerous of the heavenly bodies, all shining by their own light, and all inconceivably remote from the solar system, which nevertheless appears to be not far removed from the center of the stellar universe.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE UNIVERSE OF STARS

Our consideration of the solar system hitherto has kept us quite at home in the universe. The outer known planets, Ura.n.u.s and Neptune, are indeed far removed from the sun, and a few of the comets that belong to our family travel to even greater distances before they begin to retrace their steps sunward. When we come to consider the vast majority of the glistening points on the celestial sphere--all in fact except the five great planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn--we are dealing with bodies that are self-luminous like the sun, but that vary in size quite as the bodies of the solar system do, some stars being smaller than the sun and others many hundred fold larger than he is; some being "giants," and others "dwarfs." But the overwhelming remoteness of all these bodies arrests our attention and even taxes our credulity regarding the methods that astronomers have depended on to ascertain their distances from us.

Their seeming countlessness, too, is as bewildering as are the distances; though, if we make actual counts of those visible to the naked eye within a certain area, in the body of the "Great Bear," for example, the great surprise will be that there are so few. And if the entire dome of the sky is counted, at any one time, a clear, moonless sky would reveal perhaps 2,500, so that in the entire sky, northern and southern, we might expect to find 5,000 to 6,000 lucid stars, or stars visible to the naked eye.

But when the telescope is applied, every accession of power increases the myriads of fainter and fainter stars, until the number within optical reach of present instruments is somewhere between 400 and 500 millions. But if we were to push the 100-inch reflector on Mount Wilson to its limit by photography with plates of the highest sensitiveness, millions upon millions of excessively faint stars would be plainly visible on the plates which the human eye can never hope to see directly with any telescope present or future, and which would doubtless swell the total number of stars to a thousand millions. Recent counts of stars by Chapman and Melotte of Greenwich tend to substantiate this estimate.

What have astronomers done to cla.s.sify or catalogue this vast array of bodies in the sky? Even before making any attempt to estimate their number, there is a system of cla.s.sification simply by the amount of light they send us, or by their apparent stellar magnitudes--not their actual magnitudes, for of those we know as yet very little. We speak of stars of the "first magnitude," of which there are about 20, Sirius being the brightest and Regulus the faintest. Then there are about 65 of the second, or next fainter, magnitude, stars like Polaris, for example, which give an amount of light two and a half times less than the average first magnitude star. Stars of the third magnitude are fainter than those of the second in the same ratio, but their number increases to 200; fourth magnitude, 500; fifth magnitude, 1,400; sixth magnitude, 5,000, and these are so faint that they are just visible on the best nights without telescopic aid.

Decimals express all intermediate graduations of magnitude. Astronomers carry the telescopic magnitudes much farther, till a magnitude beyond the twentieth is reached, preserving in every case the ratio of two and one-half for each magnitude in relation to that numerically next to it.

Even Jupiter and Venus, and the sun and moon, are sometimes calculated on this scale of stellar magnitude, numerically negative, of course, Venus sometimes being as bright as magnitude -4.3, and the sun -26.7.

Knowing thus the relation of sun, moon, and stars, and the number of the stars of different magnitudes, it is possible to estimate the total light from the stars. This interesting relation comes out this way: that the stars we cannot see with the naked eye give a greater total of light than those we can because of their vastly greater numbers. And if we calculate the total light of all the brighter stars down to magnitude nine and one-half, we find it equal to 1/80th of the light of the average full moon.

Many stars show marked differences in color, and strictly speaking the stars are now cla.s.sified by their colors. The atmosphere affects star colors very considerably, low alt.i.tudes, or greater thickness of air, absorbing the bluish rays more strongly and making the stars appear redder than they really are. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Antares are well-known red stars, Capella and Alpha Ceti yellowish, Vega and Sirius blue, and Procyon and Polaris white. Among the telescopic stars are many of a deep blood-red tint, variable stars being numerous among them.

Double stars, too, are often complementary in color. There is evidence indicating change of color of a very few stars in long periods of time; Sirius, for example, two thousand years ago was a red star, now it is blue or bluish white. But the meaning of color, or change of color in a star is as yet only incompletely ascertained. It may be connected with the radiative intensity of the star, or its age, or both.

The late Professor Edward C. Pickering was famous for his life-long study and determination of the magnitudes of the stars. Standards of comparison have been many, and have led to much unnecessary work.

Pickering chose Polaris as a standard and devised the meridian photometer, an ingenious instrument of high accuracy, in which the light of a star is compared directly with that of the pole star by reflection.

All the bright stars of both the northern and the southern skies are worked into a standard system of magnitudes known as HP, or the Harvard Photometry.

Astronomers make use of several different kinds of magnitude for the stars: the apparent magnitude, as the eye sees it, often called the visual magnitude; the photographic magnitude, as the photographic plate records it, and these are now determined with the highest accuracy; the photovisual magnitude, quite the same as the visual, but determined photographically on an isochromatic plate with a yellow screen or filter, so that the intensity is nearly the same as it appears to the eye. The difference between the star's visual or photovisual magnitude and its photographic magnitude is called its color-index, and is often used as a measure of the star's color. Light of the shorter wave lengths, as blue and violet, affects the photographic plate more rapidly than the reds and yellows of longer wave length by which the eye mainly sees; so that red stars will appear much fainter and blue stars much brighter on the ordinary photographic plate than the eye sees them.

So great are the differences of color in the stars that well-known asterisms, with which the eye is perfectly familiar, are sometimes quite unrecognizable on the photographic plate, except by relative positions of the stars composing them. White stars affect the eye and the plate about equally, so that their visual or photovisual and photographic magnitudes are about equal. The studies of the colors of the stars, the different methods of determining them, and the relations of color to const.i.tution have been made the subject of especial investigation by Seares of Mount Wilson and many other astronomers.

Centuries of the work of astronomers have been faithfully devoted to mapping or charting the stars and cataloguing them. Just as we have geographical maps of countries, so the heavens are parceled out in sections, and the stars set down in their true relative positions just as cities are on the map. Recent years have added photographic charts, especially of detailed regions of the sky; but owing to spectral differences of the stars, their photographic magnitudes are often quite different from their visual magnitudes. From these maps and charts the positions of the stars can be found with much precision; but if we want the utmost accuracy, we must go to the star catalogues--huge volumes oftentimes, with stellar positions set down therein with the last degree of precision.

First there will be the star's name, and in the next column its magnitude, and in a third the star's right ascension. This is its angular distance eastward around the celestial sphere starting from the vernal equinox, and it corresponds quite closely to the longitude of a place which we should get from a gazetteer, if we wished to locate it on the earth. Then another column of the catalogue will give the star's declination, north or south of the equator, just as the gazetteer will locate a city by its north or south lat.i.tude.

CHAPTER XLV

STAR CHARTS AND CATALOGUES

Who made the first star chart or catalogue? There is little doubt that Eudoxus (B. C. 200) was the first to set down the positions of all the brighter stars on a celestial globe, and he did this from observations with a gnomon and an armillary sphere. Later Hipparchus (B. C. 130) constructed the first known catalogue of stars, so that astronomers of a later day might discover what changes are in progress among the stars, either in their relative positions or caused by old stars disappearing or new stars appearing at times in the heavens. Hipparchus was an accurate observer, and he discovered an apparent and perpetual shifting of the vernal equinox westward, by which the right ascensions of the stars are all the time increasing. He determined the amount of it pretty accurately, too. His catalogue contained 1,080 stars, and is printed in the "Almagest" of Ptolemy.

Centuries elapsed before a second star catalogue was made, by Ulugh-Beg, an Arabian astronomer, A. D. 1420, who was a son of Tamerlane, the Tartar monarch of Samarcand, where the observations for the catalogue were made. The stars were mainly those of Ptolemy, and much the same stars were reobserved by Tycho Brahe (A. D. 1580) with his greatly improved instruments, thus forming the third and last star catalogue of importance before the invention of the telescope.

From the end of the seventeenth century onward, the application of the telescope to all the types of instruments for making observations of star places has increased the accuracy many-fold. The entire heavens has been covered by Argelander in the northern hemisphere, and Gould in the southern--over 700,000 stars in all. Many government observatories are still at work cataloguing the stars. The Carnegie Inst.i.tution of Washington maintains a department of astrometry under Boss of Albany, which has already issued a preliminary catalogue of more than 6,000 stars, and has a great general catalogue in progress, together with investigations of stellar motions and parallaxes. This catalogue of star positions will include proper motions of stars to the seventh magnitude.

In 1887 on proposal of the late Sir David Gill, an international congress of astronomers met at Paris and arranged for the construction of a photographic chart of the entire heavens, allotting the work to eighteen observatories, equipped with photographic telescopes essentially alike. The total number of plates exceeds 25,000. Stars of the fourteenth magnitude are recorded, but only those including the eleventh magnitude will be catalogued, perhaps 2,000,000 in all. The expense of this comprehensive map of the stars has already exceeded $2,000,000, and the work is now nearly complete. Turner of Oxford has conducted many special investigations that have greatly enhanced the progress of this international enterprise.

Other great photographic star charts have been carried through by the Harvard Observatory, with the annex at Arequipa, Peru, employing the Bruce photographic telescope, a doublet with 24-inch lenses; also Kapteyn of Groningen has catalogued about 300,000 stars on plates taken at Cape Town. Charting and cataloguing the stars, both visually and photographically, is a work that will never be entirely finished.

Improvements in processes will be such that it can be better done in the future than it is now, and the detection of changes in the fainter stars and investigation of their motions will necessitate repet.i.tion of the entire work from century to century.

The origin of the names of individual stars is a question of much interest. The constellation figures form the basis of the method, and the earliest names were given according to location in the especial figure; as for instance, Cor Scorpii, the heart of the Scorpion, later known as Antares or Alpha Scorpii. The Arabians adopted many star names from the Greeks, and gave about a hundred special names to other stars.

Some of these are in common use to-day, by navigators, observers of meteors and of variable stars. Sirius, Vega, Arcturus, and a few other first magnitude stars, are instances.

But this method is quite insufficient for the fainter stars whose numbers increase so rapidly. Bayer, a contemporary of Galileo, originated our present system, which also employs the names of the constellations, the Latin genitive in each case, prefixed by the small letters of the Greek alphabet, from alpha to omega, in order of decreasing brightness; and followed by the Roman letters when the Greek alphabet is exhausted.

If there were still stars left in a constellation unnamed, numbers were used, first by Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal; and numbers in the order of right ascension in various catalogues are used to designate hundreds of other stars. The vast bulk of the stars are, however, nameless; but about one million are identifiable by their positions (right ascension and declination) on the celestial sphere.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE SUN'S MOTION TOWARD LYRA

If Hipparchus or Galileo should return to earth to-night and look at the stars and constellations as we see them, there would be no change whatever discernible in either the brightness of the stars or in their relative positions. So the name fixed stars would appear to have been well chosen. Halley in the seventeenth century was the first to detect that slow relative change of position of a few stars which is known as proper motion, and all the modern catalogues give the proper motions in both right ascension and declination. These are simply the small annual changes in position athwart the line of vision; and, as a whole, the proper motions of the brighter stars exceed the corresponding motions of the fainter ones because they are nearer to us. The average proper motion of the brightest stars is 0".25, and of stars of the sixth magnitude only one-sixth as great.