Recreations in Astronomy Part 16

to study, with improved instruments, two new stars; On the evening of May 12th, 1866, a star of the second magnitude was observed in the Northern Crown, where no star above the fifth magnitude had been twenty-four hours before. In Argelander's chart a star of the tenth magnitude occupies the place. May 13th it had declined to the third magnitude, May 16th to the fourth, May 17th to the fifth, May 19th to the seventh, May 31st to the ninth, and has since diminished to the tenth. The spectroscope showed it to be a star in the usual condition; but through the usual colored spectrum, crossed with bright lines, shone four bright lines, two of which indicated glowing hydrogen. Here was plenty of proof that an unusual amount of this gas had given this sun its sudden flame. As the hydrogen burned out the star grew dim.

Two theories immediately presented themselves: First, that vast volumes had been liberated from within the orb by some sudden breaking up of the doors of its great deeps; or, second, this star had precipitated upon itself, by attraction, some other sun or planet, the force of whose impact had been changed into heat.

Though we see the liberated hydrogen of our sun burst up with sudden flame, it can hardly be supposed that enough could be liberated at once to increase the light and heat one hundred-fold.

In regard to the second theory, it is capable of proof that two suns half as large as ours, moving at a velocity of four hundred and seventy-six miles per second, would evolve heat enough to supply the radiation of our sun for fifty million years. How could it be possible for a sun like this newly blazing orb to cool off to such a [Page 225] degree in a month? Besides, there would not be one chance in a thousand for two orbs to come directly together. They would revolve about each other till a kind of grazing contact of grinding worlds would slowly kindle the ultimate heat.

It is far more likely that this star encountered an enormous stream of meteoric bodies, or perhaps absorbed a whole comet, that laid its million leagues of tail as fuel on the central fire. Only let it be remembered that the fuel is far more force than substance.

Allusion has already been made to the sudden brightening of our sun on the first day of September, 1859. That was caused, no doubt, by the fall of large meteors, following in the train of the comet of 1843, or some other comet. What the effect would have been, had the whole ma.s.s of the comet been absorbed, cannot be imagined.

Another new star lately appeared in Cygnus, near the famous star 61--the first star in the northern hemisphere whose distance was determined. It was first seen November 24th, 1876, as a third magnitude star of a yellow color. By December 2d it had sunk to the fourth magnitude, and changed to a greenish color. It had then three bright hydrogen lines, the strong double sodium line, and others, which made, it strongly resemble the spectrum of the chromosphere of our sun. An entirely different result appeared in the fading of these two stars. In the case of the star in the Crown, the extraordinary light was the first to fade, leaving the usual stellar spectrum. In the case of the star in Cygnus, the part of the spectrum belonging to stellar light was the first to fade, leaving the bright lines; that is, the gas of one gave way to regular starlight, and the starlight [Page 226] of the other having faded, the regular light of the glowing gas continued. By some strange oversight, no one studied the star again for six months. In September and November, 1877, the light of this star was found to be blue, and not to be starlight at all. It had no rainbow spectrum, only one kind of rays, and hence only one color. Its sole spectroscopic line is believed to be that of glowing nitrogen gas. We have then, probably, in the star of 1876, a body shining by a feeble and undiscernible light, surrounded by a discernible immensity of light of nitrogen gas. This is its usual condition; but if a flight of meteors should raise the heat of the central body so as to outshine the nebulous envelope, we should have the conditions we discovered in November, 1876. But a rapid cooling dissipates the observable light of all colors, and leaves only the glowing gas of one color.

_Movements of Stars._

We call the stars _fixed_, but motion and life are necessary to all things. Besides the motion in the line of sight described already, there is motion in every other conceivable direction. We knew Sirius moved before we had found the cause. We know that our sun moves back and forth in his easy bed one-half his vast diameter, as the larger planets combine their influence on one side or the other.

The sun has another movement. We find the stars in Hercules gradually spreading from each other. Hercules's brawny limbs grow brawnier every century. There can be but one cause: we are approaching that quarter of the heavens. (See [Symbol], Fig. 72.) We are even [Page 227] able to compute the velocity of our approach; it is four miles a second. The stars in the opposite quarter of the heavens in Argo are drawing nearer together.

This movement would have no effect on the apparent place of the stars at either pole, if they were all equally distant; but it must greatly extend or contract the apparent s.p.a.ce between them, since they are situated at various distances.

Independent of this, the stars themselves are all in motion, but so vast is the distance from which we observe them that it has taken an acc.u.mulation of centuries before they could be made measurable.

A train going forty miles an hour, seen from a distance of two miles, almost seems to stand still. Arcturus moves through s.p.a.ce three times as fast as the earth, but it takes a century to appear to move the eighth part of the diameter of the moon. There is a star in the Hunting Dogs, known as 1830 Groombridge, which has a velocity beyond what all the attraction of the matter of the known universe could give it. By the year 9000 it may be in Berenice's Hair.

Some stars have a common movement, being evidently related together.

A large proportion of the brighter stars between Aldebaran and the Pleiades have a common motion eastward of about ten seconds a century. All the angles marked by a, b, g, ch Orionis will be altered in different directions; l is moving toward g. l and e will appear as a double star. In A.D. 50,000 Procyon will be nearer ch Orionis than Rigel now is, and Sirius will be in line with a and ch Orionis. All the stars of the Great Dipper, except Benetnasch and Dubhe, have a common motion somewhat in the direction [Page 228]

of Thuban (Fig. 67), while the two named have a motion nearly opposite. In 36,000 years the end of the Dipper will have fallen out so that it will hold no water, and the handle will be broken square off at Mizar. "The Southern Cross," says Humboldt, "will not always keep its characteristic form, for its four stars travel in different directions with unequal velocities. At the present time it is not known how many myriads of years must elapse before its entire dislocation."

These movements are not in fortuitous or chaotic ways, but are doubtless in accordance with some perfect plan. We have climbed up from revolving earth and moon to revolving planets and sun, in order to understand how two or ten suns can revolve about a common centre. Let us now leap to the grander idea that all the innumerable stars of a winter night not only loan, but must revolve about some centre of gravity. Men have been looking for a central sun of suns, and have not found it. None is needed. Two suns can balance about a point; all suns can swing about a common centre.

That one unmoving centre may be that city more gorgeous than Eastern imagination ever conceived, whose pavement is transparent gold, whose walls are precious stones, whose light is life, and where no dark planetary bodies ever cast shadows. There reigns the King and Lord of all, and ranged about are the far-off provinces of his material systems. They all move in his sight, and receive power from a mind that never wearies.

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XI.

THE WORLDS AND THE WORD.

"The worlds were framed by the word of G.o.d."--_Heb._ xi., 3.

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"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew thee From report divine, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue?

Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with all the host of heaven, came, And lo! creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, O Sun! Oh who could find, Whilst fruit and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such countless worlds thou mad'st us blind!

Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?

If light conceal so much, wherefore not life?"

BLANCO WHITE.

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XI.

_THE WORLDS AND THE WORD._

Men have found the various worlds to be far richer than they originally thought. They have opened door after door in their vast treasuries, have ascended throne after throne of power, and ruled realms of increasing extent. We have no doubt that unfoldings in the future will amaze even those whose expectations have been quickened by the revealings of the past. What if it be found that the Word is equally inexhaustible?

After ages of thought and discovery we have come out of the darkness and misconceptions of men. We believe in no serpent, turtle, or elephant supporting the world; no Atlas holding up the heavens; no crystal domes, "with cycles and epicycles scribbled o'er." What if it be found that one book, written by ignorant men, never fell into these mistakes of the wisest! Nay, more, what if some of the greatest triumphs of modern science are to be found plainly stated in a book older than the writings of Homer? If suns, planets, and satellites, with all their possibilities of life, changes of flora and fauna, could be all provided for, as some scientists tell us, in the fiery star-dust of a cloud, why may not the same Author provide a perpetually widening river of life in his Word? As we believe He is perpetually present in his worlds, we know He has [Page 232] promised to be perpetually present in his Word, making it alive with spirit and life.

The wise men of the past could not avoid alluding to ideas the falsity of which subsequent discovery has revealed; but the writers of the Bible did avoid such erroneous allusion. Of course they referred to some things, as sunrise and sunset, according to appearance; but our most scientific books do the same to-day. That the Bible could avoid teaching the opposite of scientific truth proclaims that a higher than human wisdom was in its teaching.

That negative argument is strong, but the affirmative argument is much stronger. The Bible declares scientific truth far in advance of its discovery, far in advance of man's ability to understand its plain declarations. Take a few conspicuous ill.u.s.trations:

The Bible a.s.serted from the first that the present order of things had a beginning. After ages of investigation, after researches in the realms of physics, arguments in metaphysics, and conclusions by the necessities of resistless logic, science has reached the same result.

The Bible a.s.serted from the first that creation of matter preceded arrangement. It was chaos--void--without form--darkness; arrangement was a subsequent work. The world was not created in the form it was to have; it was to be moulded, shaped, stratified, coaled, mountained, valleyed, subsequently. All of which science utters ages afterward.

The Bible did not hesitate to affirm that light existed before the sun, though men did not believe it, and used it as a weapon against inspiration. Now we praise men for having demonstrated the oldest record.

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It is a recently discovered truth of science that the trata of the earth were formed by the action of water, and the mountains were once under the ocean. It is an idea long familiar to Bible readers: "Thou coverest the earth with the deep as with a garment.

The waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. The mountains ascend; the valleys descend into the place thou hast founded for them."

Here is a whole volume of geology in a paragraph. The thunder of continental convulsions is G.o.d's voice; the mountains rise by G.o.d's power; the waters haste away unto the place G.o.d prepared for them.

Our slowness of geological discovery is perfectly accounted for by Peter. "For of this they are _willingly ignorant_, that by the word of G.o.d there were heavens of old, and land framed out of water, and by means of water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed by water, perished." We recognize these geological subsidences, but we read them from the testimony of the rocks more willingly than from the testimony of the Word.

Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an order of development on earth--tender gra.s.s, herb, tree; moving creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle, man. The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it G.o.d's successive creations.

During ages on ages man's wisdom held the earth to be flat. Meanwhile, G.o.d was saying, century after century, of himself, "He sitteth upon the sphere of the earth" (Gesenius).

Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold [Page 234] the earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported them. Meanwhile, G.o.d was perpetually telling men that he had hung the earth upon nothing.

Men were ever trying to number the stars. Hipparchus counted one thousand and twenty-two; Ptolemy one thousand and twenty-six; and it is easy to number those visible to the naked eye. But the Bible said, when there were no telescopes to make it known, that they were as the sands of the sea, "innumerable." Science has appliances of enumeration unknown to other ages, but the s.p.a.ce-penetrating telescopes and tastimeters reveal more worlds--eighteen millions in a single system, and systems beyond count--till men acknowledge that the stars are innumerable to man. It is G.o.d's prerogative "to number all the stars; he also calleth them all by their names."

Torricelli's discovery that the air had weight was received with incredulity. For ages the air had propelled ships, thrust itself against the bodies of men, and overturned their works. But no man ever dreamed that weight was necessary to give momentum. During all the centuries it had stood in the Bible, waiting for man's comprehension: "He gave to the air its weight" (Job xxviii. 25).

The pet science of to-day is meteorology. The fluctuations and variations of the weather have hitherto baffled all attempts at unravelling them. It has seemed that there was no law in their fickle changes. But at length perseverance and skill have triumphed, and a single man in one place predicts the weather and winds [Page 235] for a continent. But the Bible has always insisted that the whole department was under law; nay, it laid down that law so clearly, that if men had been willing to learn from it they might have reached this wisdom ages ago. The whole moral law is not more clearly crystallized in "Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," than all the fundamentals of the science of meteorology are crystallized in these words: "The wind goeth toward the south (equator), and turneth about (up) unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits (established routes). All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again" (Eccles. i. 6, 7).

Those scientific queries which G.o.d propounded to Job were unanswerable then; most of them are so now. "Whereon are the sockets of the earth made to sink?" Job never knew the earth turned in sockets; much less could he tell where they were fixed. G.o.d answered this question elsewhere. "He stretcheth the north (one socket) over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." Speaking of the day-spring, G.o.d says the earth is _turned_ to it, as clay to the seal. The earth's axial revolution is clearly recognized.

Copernicus declared it early; G.o.d earlier.

No man yet understands the balancing of the clouds, nor the suspension of the frozen ma.s.ses of hail, any more than Job did.

Had G.o.d asked if he had perceived the _length_ of the earth, many a man to-day could have answered yes. But the eternal ice keeps us from perceiving the _breadth_ [Page 236] of the earth, and shows the discriminating wisdom of the question.

The statement that the sun's going is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit to the ends of it, has given edge to many a sneer at its supposed a.s.sertion that the sun went round the earth. It teaches a higher truth--that the sun itself obeys the law it enforces on the planets, and flies in an orbit of its own, from one end of heaven in Argo to the other in Hercules.

So eminent an astronomer and so true a Christian as General Mitch.e.l.l, who understood the voices in which the heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, who read with delight the Word of G.o.d em bodied in worlds, and who fed upon the written Word of G.o.d as his daily bread, declared, "We find an aptness and propriety in all these astronomical ill.u.s.trations, which are not weakened, but amazingly strengthened, when viewed in the clear light of our present knowledge." Herschel says, "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths that come from on high, and are contained in the sacred writings." The common authorship of the worlds and the Word becomes apparent; their common unexplorable wealth is a necessary conclusion.