History of Astronomy Part 10

[2] _Astr. Nach._, 2,944.

[3] _Acad. des Sc._, Paris; _C.R._, lx.x.xiii., 1876.

[4] _Mem. Spettr. Ital._, xi., p. 28.

[5] _R. S. Phil. Trans_., No. 1.

[6] Grant's _Hist. Ph. Ast_., p. 267.

[7] _Nature_, November 12th, 1908.

[8] _Ast. Nach_., Nos. 791, 792, 814, translated by G. B. Airy.

_Naut. Alm_., Appendix, 1856.

14. COMETS AND METEORS.

Ever since Halley discovered that the comet of 1682 was a member of the solar system, these wonderful objects have had a new interest for astronomers; and a comparison of orbits has often identified the return of a comet, and led to the detection of an elliptic orbit where the difference from a parabola was imperceptible in the small portion of the orbit visible to us. A remarkable case in point was the comet of 1556, of whose ident.i.ty with the comet of 1264 there could be little doubt. Hind wanted to compute the orbit more exactly than Halley had done. He knew that observations had been made, but they were lost. Having expressed his desire for a search, all the observations of Fabricius and of h.e.l.ler, and also a map of the comet's path among the stars, were eventually unearthed in the most unlikely manner, after being lost nearly three hundred years. Hind and others were certain that this comet would return between 1844 and 1848, but it never appeared.

When the spectroscope was first applied to finding the composition of the heavenly bodies, there was a great desire to find out what comets are made of. The first opportunity came in 1864, when Donati observed the spectrum of a comet, and saw three bright bands, thus proving that it was a gas and at least partly self-luminous. In 1868 Huggins compared the spectrum of Winnecke's comet with that of a Geissler tube containing olefiant gas, and found exact agreement. Nearly all comets have shown the same spectrum.[1] A very few comets have given bright band spectra differing from the normal type. Also a certain kind of continuous spectrum, as well as reflected solar light showing Frauenhofer lines, have been seen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COPY OF THE DRAWING MADE BY PAUL FABRICIUS. To define the path of comet 1556. After being lost for 300 years, this drawing was recovered by the prolonged efforts of Mr. Hind and Professor Littrow in 1856.]

When Wells's comet, in 1882, approached very close indeed to the sun, the spectrum changed to a mono-chromatic yellow colour, due to sodium.

For a full account of the wonders of the cometary world the reader is referred to books on descriptive astronomy, or to monographs on comets.[2] Nor can the very uncertain speculations about the structure of comets' tails be given here. A new explanation has been proposed almost every time that a great discovery has been made in the theory of light, heat, chemistry, or electricity.

Halley's comet remained the only one of which a prediction of the return had been confirmed, until the orbit of the small, ill-defined comet found by Pons in 1819 was computed by Encke, and found to have a period of 3 years. It was predicted to return in 1822, and was recognised by him as identical with many previous comets. This comet, called after Encke, has showed in each of its returns an inexplicable reduction of mean distance, which led to the a.s.sertion of a resisting medium in s.p.a.ce until a better explanation could be found.[3]

Since that date fourteen comets have been found with elliptic orbits, whose aphelion distances are all about the same as Jupiter's mean distance; and six have an aphelion distance about ten per cent, greater than Neptune's mean distance. Other comets are similarly a.s.sociated with the planets Saturn and Ura.n.u.s.

The physical transformations of comets are among the most wonderful of unexplained phenomena in the heavens. But, for physical astronomers, the greatest interest attaches to the reduction of radius vector of Encke's comet, the splitting of Biela's comet into two comets in 1846, and the somewhat similar behaviour of other comets. It must be noted, however, that comets have a sensible size, that all their parts cannot travel in exactly the same orbit under the sun's gravitation, and that their ma.s.s is not sufficient to retain the parts together very forcibly; also that the inevitable collision of particles, or else fluid friction, is absorbing energy, and so reducing the comet's velocity.

In 1770 Lexell discovered a comet which, as was afterwards proved by investigations of Lexell, Burchardt, and Laplace, had in 1767 been deflected by Jupiter out of an orbit in which it was invisible from the earth into an orbit with a period of 5 years, enabling it to be seen. In 1779 it again approached Jupiter closer than some of his satellites, and was sent off in another orbit, never to be again recognised.

But our interest in cometary orbits has been added to by the discovery that, owing to the causes just cited, a comet, if it does not separate into discrete parts like Biela's, must in time have its parts spread out so as to cover a sensible part of the orbit, and that, when the earth pa.s.ses through such part of a comet's...o...b..t, a meteor shower is the result.

A magnificent meteor shower was seen in America on November 12th-13th, 1833, when the paths of the meteors all seemed to radiate from a point in the constellation Leo. A similar display had been witnessed in Mexico by Humboldt and Bonpland on November 12th, 1799. H. A. Newton traced such records back to October 13th, A.D. 902. The orbital motion of a cloud or stream of small particles was indicated. The period favoured by H. A. Newton was 354 days; another suggestion was 375 days, and another 33 years. He noticed that the advance of the date of the shower between 902 and 1833, at the rate of one day in seventy years, meant a progression of the node of the orbit. Adams undertook to calculate what the amount would be on all the five suppositions that had been made about the period. After a laborious work, he found that none gave one day in seventy years except the 33-year period, which did so exactly. H. A. Newton predicted a return of the shower on the night of November 13th-14th, 1866. He is now dead; but many of us are alive to recall the wonder and enthusiasm with which we saw this prediction being fulfilled by the grandest display of meteors ever seen by anyone now alive.

The _progression_ of the nodes proved the path of the meteor stream to be retrograde. The _radiant_ had almost the exact longitude of the point towards which the earth was moving. This proved that the meteor cl.u.s.ter was at perihelion. The period being known, the eccentricity of the orbit was obtainable, also the orbital velocity of the meteors in perihelion; and, by comparing this with the earth's velocity, the lat.i.tude of the radiant enabled the inclination to be determined, while the longitude of the earth that night was the longitude of the node. In such a way Schiaparelli was able to find first the elements of the orbit of the August meteor shower (Perseids), and to show its ident.i.ty with the orbit of Tuttle's comet 1862.iii. Then, in January 1867, Le Verrier gave the elements of the November meteor shower (Leonids); and Peters, of Altona, identified these with Oppolzer's elements for Tempel's comet 1866--Schiaparelli having independently attained both of these results. Subsequently Weiss, of Vienna, identified the meteor shower of April 20th (Lyrids) with comet 1861. Finally, that indefatigable worker on meteors, A. S. Herschel, added to the number, and in 1878 gave a list of seventy-six coincidences between cometary and meteoric orbits.

Cometary astronomy is now largely indebted to photography, not merely for accurate delineations of shape, but actually for the discovery of most of them. The art has also been applied to the observation of comets at distances from their perihelia so great as to prevent their visual observation. Thus has Wolf, of Heidelburg, found upon old plates the position of comet 1905.v., as a star of the 15.5 magnitude, 783 days before the date of its discovery. From the point of view of the importance of finding out the divergence of a cometary orbit from a parabola, its period, and its aphelion distance, this increase of range attains the very highest value.

The present Astronomer Royal, appreciating this possibility, has been searching by photography for Halley's comet since November, 1907, although its perihelion pa.s.sage will not take place until April, 1910.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 1874, when the writer was crossing the Pacific Ocean in H.M.S. "Scout," Coggia's comet unexpectedly appeared, and (while Colonel Tupman got its positions with the s.e.xtant) he tried to use the prism out of a portable direct-vision spectroscope, without success until it was put in front of the object-gla.s.s of a binocular, when, to his great joy, the three band images were clearly seen.

[2] Such as _The World of Comets_, by A. Guillemin; _History of Comets_, by G. R. Hind, London, 1859; _Theatrum Cometic.u.m_, by S. de Lubienietz, 1667; _Cometographie_, by Pingre, Paris, 1783; _Donati's Comet_, by Bond.

[3] The investigations by Von Asten (of St. Petersburg) seem to support, and later ones, especially those by Backlund (also of St. Petersburg), seem to discredit, the idea of a resisting medium.

15. THE FIXED STARS AND NEBUL.

Pa.s.sing now from our solar system, which appears to be subject to the action of the same forces as those we experience on our globe, there remains an innumerable host of fixed stars, nebulas, and nebulous cl.u.s.ters of stars. To these the attention of astronomers has been more earnestly directed since telescopes have been so much enlarged.

Photography also has enabled a vast amount of work to be covered in a comparatively short period, and the spectroscope has given them the means, not only of studying the chemistry of the heavens, but also of detecting any motion in the line of sight from less than a mile a second and upwards in any star, however distant, provided it be bright enough.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL, F.R.S.--1738-1822. Painted by Lemuel F. Abbott; National Portrait Gallery, Room XX.]

In the field of telescopic discovery beyond our solar system there is no one who has enlarged our knowledge so much as Sir William Herschel, to whom we owe the greatest discovery in dynamical astronomy among the stars--viz., that the law of gravitation extends to the most distant stars, and that many of them describe elliptic orbits about each other. W. Herschel was born at Hanover in 1738, came to England in 1758 as a trained musician, and died in 1822. He studied science when he could, and hired a telescope, until he learnt to make his own specula and telescopes. He made 430 parabolic specula in twenty-one years. He discovered 2,500 nebulae and 806 double stars, counted the stars in 3,400 guage-fields, and compared the princ.i.p.al stars photometrically.

Some of the things for which he is best known were results of those accidents that happen only to the indefatigable enthusiast. Such was the discovery of Ura.n.u.s, which led to funds being provided for constructing his 40-feet telescope, after which, in 1786, he settled at Slough. In the same way, while trying to detect the annual parallax of the stars, he failed in that quest, but discovered binary systems of stars revolving in ellipses round each other; just as Bradley's attack on stellar parallax failed, but led to the discovery of aberration, nutation, and the true velocity of light.

_Parallax_.--The absence of stellar parallax was the great objection to any theory of the earth's motion prior to Kepler's time. It is true that Kepler's theory itself could have been geometrically expressed equally well with the earth or any other point fixed. But in Kepler's case the obviously implied physical theory of the planetary motions, even before Newton explained the simplicity of conception involved, made astronomers quite ready to waive the claim for a rigid proof of the earth's motion by measurement of an annual parallax of stars, which they had insisted on in respect of Copernicus's revival of the idea of the earth's...o...b..tal motion.

Still, the desire to measure this parallax was only intensified by the practical certainty of its existence, and by repeated failures. The attempts of Bradley failed. The attempts of Piazzi and Brinkley,[1]

early in the nineteenth century, also failed. The first successes, afterwards confirmed, were by Bessel and Henderson. Both used stars whose proper motion had been found to be large, as this argued proximity. Henderson, at the Cape of Good Hope, observed Centauri, whose annual proper motion he found to amount to 3".6, in 1832-3; and a few years later deduced its parallax 1".16. His successor at the Cape, Maclear, reduced this to 0".92.

In 1835 Struve a.s.signed a doubtful parallax of 0".261 to Vega ( Lyrae). But Bessel's observations, between 1837 and 1840, of 61 Cygni, a star with the large proper motion of over 5", established its annual parallax to be 0".3483; and this was confirmed by Peters, who found the value 0".349.

Later determinations for Centauri, by Gill,[2] make its parallax 0".75--This is the nearest known fixed star; and its light takes 4 years to reach us. The light year is taken as the unit of measurement in the starry heavens, as the earth's mean distance is "the astronomical unit" for the solar system.[3] The proper motions and parallaxes combined tell us the velocity of the motion of these stars across the line of sight: Centauri 14.4 miles a second=4.2 astronomical units a year; 61 Cygni 37.9 miles a second=11.2 astronomical units a year. These successes led to renewed zeal, and now the distances of many stars are known more or less accurately.

Several of the brightest stars, which might be expected to be the nearest, have not shown a parallax amounting to a twentieth of a second of arc. Among these are Canopus, Orionis, Cygni, Centauri, and Ca.s.siopeia. Oudemans has published a list of parallaxes observed.[4]

_Proper Motion._--In 1718 Halley[5] detected the proper motions of Arcturus and Sirius. In 1738 J. Ca.s.sinis[6] showed that the former had moved five minutes of arc since Tycho Brahe fixed its position. In 1792 Piazzi noted the motion of 61 Cygni as given above. For a long time the greatest observed proper motion was that of a small star 1830 Groombridge, nearly 7" a year; but others have since been found reaching as much as 10".

Now the spectroscope enables the motion of stars to be detected at a single observation, but only that part of the motion that is in the line of sight. For a complete knowledge of a star's motion the proper motion and parallax must also be known.

When Huggins first applied the Doppler principle to measure velocities in the line of sight,[7] the faintness of star spectra diminished the accuracy; but Vogel, in 1888, overcame this to a great extent by long exposures of photographic plates.

It has often been noticed that stars which seem to belong to a group of nearly uniform magnitude have the same proper motion. The spectroscope has shown that these have also often the same velocity in the line of sight. Thus in the Great Bear, , , , , , all agree as to angular proper motion. was too faint for a spectroscopic measurement, but all the others have been shown to be approaching us at a rate of twelve to twenty miles a second. The same has been proved for proper motion, and line of sight motion, in the case of Pleiades and other groups.

Maskelyne measured many proper motions of stars, from which W.

Herschel[8] came to the conclusion that these apparent motions are for the most part due to a motion of the solar system in s.p.a.ce towards a point in the constellation Hercules, R.A. 257; N. Decl. 25. This grand discovery has been amply confirmed, and, though opinions differ as to the exact direction, it happens that the point first indicated by Herschel, from totally insufficient data, agrees well with modern estimates.

Comparing the proper motions and parallaxes to get the actual velocity of each star relative to our system, C.L. Struve found the probable velocity of the solar system in s.p.a.ce to be fifteen miles a second, or five astronomical units a year.

The work of Herschel in this matter has been checked by comparing spectroscopic velocities in the line of sight which, so far as the sun's motion is concerned, would give a maximum rate of approach for stars near Hercules, a maximum rate of recession for stars in the opposite part of the heavens, and no effect for stars half-way between. In this way the spectroscope has confirmed generally Herschel's view of the direction, and makes the velocity eleven miles a second, or nearly four astronomical units a year.

The average proper motion of a first magnitude star has been found to be 0".25 annually, and of a sixth magnitude star 0".04. But that all bright stars are nearer than all small stars, or that they show greater proper motion for that reason, is found to be far from the truth. Many statistical studies have been made in this connection, and interesting results may be expected from this treatment in the hands of Kapteyn of Groningen, and others.[9]

On a.n.a.lysis of the directions of proper motions of stars in all parts of the heavens, Kapteyn has shown[10] that these indicate, besides the solar motion towards Hercules, two general drifts of stars in nearly opposite directions, which can be detected in any part of the heavens. This result has been confirmed from independent data by Eddington (_R.A.S., M.N._) and Dyson (_R.S.E. Proc._).