Curiosities of the Sky by Garrett P. Serviss (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📖

relates to individual stars and to a few groups which happen to be so near that the effects of their movements are measurable. In some cases the motion is so rapid (not in appearance, but in reality) that the chief difficulty is to imagine how it can have been imparted, and what will eventually become of the “runaways.” Without a collision, or a series of very close approaches to great gravitational centers, a star traveling through space at the rate of two hundred or three hundred miles per second could not be arrested or turned into an orbit which would keep it forever flying within the limits of the visible universe. A famous example of these speeding stars is “1830

Groombridge,” a star of only the sixth magnitude, and consequently just visible to the naked eye, whose motion across the line of sight is so rapid that it moves upon the face of the sky a distance equal to the apparent diameter of the moon every 280 years. The distance of this star is at least 200,000,000,000,000 miles, and may be two or three times greater, so that its actual speed cannot be less than two hundred, and may be as much as four hundred, miles per second. It could be turned into a new course by a close approach to a great sun, but it could only be stopped by collision, head-on, with a body of enormous mass. Barring such accidents it must, as far as we can see, keep on until it has traversed our stellar system, whence in may escape and pass out into space beyond, to join, perhaps, one of those other universes of which we have spoken. Arcturus, one of the greatest suns in the universe, is also a runaway, whose speed of flight has been estimated all the way from fifty to two hundred miles per second.

Arcturus, we have every reason to believe, possesses hundreds of times the mass of our sun — think, then, of the prodigious momentum that its motion implies! Sirius moves more moderately, its motion across the line of sight amounting to only ten miles per second, but it is at the same time approaching the sun at about the same speed, its actual velocity in space being the resultant of the two displacements.

What has been said about the motion of Sirius brings us to another aspect of this subject. The fact is, that in every case of stellar motion the displacement that we observe represents only a part of the actual movement of the star concerned. There are stars whose motion carries them straight toward or straight away from the earth, and such stars, of course, show no cross motion. But the vast majority are traveling in paths inclined from a perpendicular to our line of sight.

Taken as a whole, the stars may be said to be flying about like the molecules in a mass of gas. The discovery of the radial component in the movements of the stars is due to the spectroscope. If a star is approaching, its spectral lines are shifted toward the violet end of the spectrum by an amount depending upon the velocity of approach; if it is receding, the lines are correspondingly shifted toward the red end. Spectroscopic observation, then, combined with micrometric measurements of the cross motion, enables us to detect the real movement of the star in space. Sometimes it happens that a star’s radial movement is periodically reversed; first it approaches, and then it recedes. This indicates that it is revolving around a near-by companion, which is often invisible, and superposed upon this motion is that of the two stars concerned, which together may be approaching or receding or traveling across the line of sight. Thus the complications involved in the stellar motions are often exceedingly great and puzzling.

Yet another source of complication exists in the movement of our own star, the sun. There is no more difficult problem in astronomy than that of disentangling the effects of the solar motion from those of the motions of the other stars. But the problem, difficult as it is, has been solved, and upon its solution depends our knowledge of the speed and direction of the movement of the solar system through space, for of course the sun carries its planets with it. One element of the solution is found in the fact that, as a result of perspective, the stars toward which we are going appear to move apart toward all points of the compass, while those behind appear to close up together. Then the spectroscopic principle already mentioned is invoked for studying the shift of the lines, which is toward the violet in the stars ahead of us and toward the red in those that we are leaving behind. Of course the effects of the independent motions of the stars must be carefully excluded. The result of the studies devoted to this subject is to show that we are traveling at a speed of twelve to fifteen miles per second in a northerly direction, toward the border of the constellations Hercules and Lyra. A curious fact is that the more recent estimates show that the direction is not very much out of a straight line drawn from the sun to the star Vega, one of the most magnificent suns in the heavens. But it should not be inferred from this that Vega is drawing us on; it is too distant for its gravitation to have such an effect.

Many unaccustomed thoughts are suggested by this mighty voyage of the solar system. Whence have we come, and whither do we go? Every year of our lives we advance at least 375,000,000 miles. Since the traditional time of Adam the sun has led his planets through the wastes of space no less than 225,000,000,000 miles, or more than 2400 times the distance that separates him from the earth. Go back in imagination to the geologic ages, and try to comprehend the distance over which the earth has flown. Where was our little planet when it emerged out of the clouds of chaos? Where was the sun when his “thunder march”

began? What strange constellations shone down upon our globe when its masters of life were the monstrous beasts of the “Age of Reptiles”?

A million years is not much of a span of time in geologic reckoning, yet a million years ago the earth was farther from its present place in space than any of the stars with a measurable parallax are now. It was more than seven times as far as Sirius, nearly fourteen times as far as Alpha Centauri, three times as far as Vega, and twice as far as Arcturus. But some geologists demand two hundred, three hundred, even one thousand million years to enable them to account for the evolutionary development of the earth and its inhabitants. In a thousand million years the earth would have traveled farther than from the remotest conceivable depths of the Milky Way!

Other curious reflections arise when we think of the form of the earth’s track as it follows the lead of the sun, in a journey which has neither known beginning nor conceivable end. There are probably many minds which have found a kind of consolation in the thought that every year the globe returns to the same place, on the same side of the sun. This idea may have an occult connection with our traditional regard for anniversaries. When that period of the year returns at which any great event in our lives has occurred we have the feeling that the earth, in its annual round, has, in a manner, brought us back to the scene of that event. We think of the earth’s orbit as a well-worn path which we traverse many times in the course of a lifetime. It seems familiar to us, and we grow to have a sort of attachment to it. The sun we are accustomed to regard as a fixed center in space, like the mill or pump around which the harnessed patient mule makes his endless circuits. But the real fact is that the earth never returns to the place in space where it has once quitted.

In consequence of the motion of the sun carrying the earth and the other planets along, the track pursued by our globe is a vast spiral in space continually developing and never returning upon its course.

It is probable that the tracks of the sun and the others stars are also irregular, and possibly spiral, although, as far as can be at present determined, they appear to be practically straight. Every star, wherever it may be situated, is attracted by its fellow-stars from many sides at once, and although the force is minimized by distance, yet in the course of many ages its effects must become manifest.

Looked at from another side, is there not something immensely stimulating and pleasing to the imagination in the idea of so stupendous a journey, which makes all of us the greatest of travelers?

In the course of a long life a man is transported through space thirty thousand million miles; Halley’s Comet does not travel one-quarter as far in making one of its immense circuits. And there are adventures on this voyage of which we are just beginning to learn to take account.

Space is full of strange things, and the earth must encounter some of them as it advances through the unknown. Many singular speculations have been indulged in by astronomers concerning the possible effects upon the earth of the varying state of the space that it traverses.

Even the alternation of hot and glacial periods has sometimes been ascribed to this source. When tropical life flourished around the poles, as the remains in the rocks assure us, the needed high temperature may, it has been thought, have been derived from the presence of the earth in a warm region of space. Then, too, there is a certain interest for us in the thought of what our familiar planet has passed through. We cannot but admire it for its long journeying as we admire the traveler who comes to us from remote and unexplored lands, or as we gaze with a glow of interest upon the first locomotive that has crossed a continent, or a ship that has visited the Arctic or Antarctic regions. If we may trust the indications of the present course, the earth, piloted by the sun, has come from the Milky Way in the far south and may eventually rejoin that mighty band of stars in the far north.

While the stars in general appear to travel independently of one another, except when they are combined in binary or trinary systems, there are notable exceptions to this rule. In some quarters of the sky we behold veritable migrations of entire groups of stars whose members are too widely separated to show any indications of revolution about a common center of gravity. This leads us back again to the wonderful group of the Pleiades. All of the principle stars composing that group are traveling in virtually parallel lines. Whatever force set them going evidently acted upon all alike. This might be explained by the assumption that when the original projective force acted upon them they were more closely united than they are at present, and that in drifting apart they have not lost the impulse of the primal motion. Or it may be supposed that they are carried along by some current in space, although it would be exceedingly difficult, in the present state of our knowledge, to explain the nature of such a current. Yet the theory of a current has been proposed. As to an attractive center around which they might revolve, none has been found. Another instance of similar “star-drift” is furnished by five of the seven stars constituting