The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert Stawell Ball (fantasy books to read .txt) 📕

are long nebulous rays; there are the wondrous spirals which have been disclosed in Lord Rosse's great reflector; there are the double nebulae. But all these various objects we must merely dismiss with this passing reference. There is a great difficulty in making pictorial representations of such nebulae. Most of them are very faint--so faint, indeed, that they can only be seen with close attention even in powerful instruments. In making drawings of these objects, therefore, it is impossible to avoid intensifying the fainter features if an intelligible picture is to be made. With this caution, however, we present Plate XVI., which exhibits several of the more remarkable nebulae as seen through Lord Rosse's great telescope.

The actual nature of the nebulae offers a problem of the greatest interest, which naturally occupied the mind of the first assiduous observer of nebulae, William Herschel, for many years. At first he assumed all nebulae to be nothing but dense aggregations of stars--a very natural conclusion for one who had so greatly advanced the optical power of telescopes, and was accustomed to see many objects which in a small telescope looked nebulous become "resolved" into stars when scrutinised with a telescope of large aperture. But in 1864, when Sir William Huggins first directed a telescope armed with a spectroscope to one of the planetary nebulae, it became evident that at least some nebulae were really clouds of fiery mist and not star clusters.

We shall in our next chapter deal with the spectra of the fixed stars, but we may here in anticipation remark that these spectra are continuous, generally showing the whole length of spectrum, from red to violet, as in the sun's spectrum, though with many and important differences as to the presence of dark and bright lines. A star cluster must, of course, give a similar spectrum, resulting from the superposition of the spectra of the single stars in the cluster. Many nebulae give a spectrum of this kind; for instance, the great nebula in Andromeda. But it does not by any means follow from this that these objects are only clusters of ordinary stars, as a continuous spectrum may be produced not only by matter in the liquid or solid state, or by gases at high pressure, but also by gases at lower pressure but high temperature under certain conditions. A continuous spectrum in the case of a nebula, therefore, need not indicate that the nebula is a cluster of bodies comparable in size and general constitution with our sun. But if a spectrum of bright lines is given by a nebula, we can be certain that gases at low pressure are present in the object under examination. And this was precisely what Sir William Huggins discovered to be the case in many nebulae. When he first decided to study the spectra of nebulae, he selected for observation those objects known as planetary nebulae--small, round, or slightly oval discs, generally without central condensation, and looking like ill-defined planets. The colour of their light, which often is blue tinted with green, is remarkable, since this is a colour very rare among single stars. The spectrum was found to be totally different to that of any star, consisting merely of three or four bright lines. The brightest one is situated in the bluish-green part of the spectrum, and was at first thought to be identical with a line of the spectrum of nitrogen, but subsequent more accurate measures have shown that neither this nor the second nebular line correspond to any dark line in the solar spectrum, nor can they be produced experimentally in the laboratory, and we are therefore unable to ascribe them to any known element. The third and fourth lines were at once seen to be identical with the two hydrogen lines which in the solar spectrum are named F and g.

Spectrum analysis has here, as on so many other occasions, rendered services which no telescope could ever have done. The spectra of nebulae have, after Huggins, been studied, both visually and photographically, by Vogel, Copeland, Campbell, Keeler, and others, and a great many very faint lines have been detected in addition to those four which an instrument of moderate dimensions shows. It is remarkable that the red C-line of hydrogen, ordinarily so bright, is either absent or excessively faint in the spectra of nebulae, but experiments by Frankland and Lockyer have shown that under certain conditions of temperature and pressure the complicated spectrum of hydrogen is reduced to one green line, the F-line. It is, therefore, not surprising that the spectra of gaseous nebulae are comparatively simple, as the probably low density of the gases in them and the faintness of these bodies would tend to reduce the spectra to a small number of lines. Some gaseous nebulae also show faint continuous spectra, the place of maximum brightness of which is not in the yellow (as in the solar spectrum), but about the green. It is probable that these continuous spectra are really an aggregate of very faint luminous lines.

A list of all the nebulae known to have a gaseous spectrum would now contain about eighty members. In addition to the planetary nebulae, many large and more diffused nebulae belong to this class, and this is also the case with the annular nebula in Lyra and the great nebula of Orion. It is needless to say that it is of special interest to find this grand object enrolled among the nebulae of a gaseous nature. In this nebula Copeland detected the wonderful D3 line of helium at a time when "helium" was a mere name, a hypothetical something, but which we now know to be an element very widely distributed through the universe. It has since been found in several other nebulae. The ease with which the characteristic gaseous spectrum is recognised has suggested the idea of sweeping the sky with a spectroscope in order to pick up new planetary nebulae, and a number of objects have actually been discovered by Pickering and Copeland in this manner, as also more recently by Pickering by examining spectrum photographs of various regions of the sky. Most of these new objects when seen through a telescope look like ordinary stars, and their real nature could never have been detected without the spectroscope.

When we look up at the starry sky on a clear night, the stars seem at first sight to be very irregularly distributed over the heavens. Here and there a few bright stars form characteristic groups, like Orion or the Great Bear, while other equally large tracts are almost devoid of bright stars and only contain a few insignificant ones. If we take a binocular, or other small telescope, and sweep the sky with it, the result seems to be the same--now we come across spaces rich in stars; now we meet with comparatively empty places. But when we approach the zone of the Milky Way, we are struck with the rapid increase of the number of stars which fill the field of the telescope; and when we reach the Milky Way itself, the eye is almost unable to separate the single points of light, which are packed so closely together that they produce the appearance to the naked eye of a broad, but very irregular, band of dim light, which even a powerful telescope in some places can hardly resolve into stars. How are we to account for this remarkable arrangement of the stars? What is the reason of our seeing so few at the parts of the heavens farthest from the Milky Way, and so very many in or near that wonderful belt? The first attempt to give an answer to these questions was made by Thomas Wright, an instrument maker in London, in a book published in 1750. He supposed the stars of our sidereal system to be distributed in a vast stratum of inconsiderable thickness compared with its length and breadth. If we had a big grindstone made of glass, in which had become uniformly imbedded a vast quantity of grains of sand or similar minute particles, and if we were able to place our eye somewhere near the centre of this grindstone, it is easy to see that we should see very few particles near the direction of the axle of the grindstone, but a great many if we looked towards any point of the circumference. This was Wright's idea of the structure of the Milky Way, and he supposed the sun to be situated not very far from the centre of this stellar stratum.

If the Milky Way itself did not exist--and we had simply the fact to build on that the stars appeared to increase rapidly in number towards a certain circle (almost a great circle) spanning the heavens--then the disc theory might have a good deal in its favour. But the telescopic study of the Milky Way, and even more the marvellous photographs of its complicated structure produced by Professor Barnard, have given the death blow to the old theory, and have made it most reasonable to conclude that the Milky Way is really, and not only apparently, a mighty stream of stars encircling the heavens. We shall shortly mention a few facts which point in this direction. A mere glance is sufficient to show that the Milky Way is not a single belt of light; near the constellation Aquila it separates into two branches with a fairly broad interval between them, and these branches do not meet again until they have proceeded far into the southern hemisphere. The disc theory had, in order to explain this, to assume that the stellar stratum was cleft in two nearly to the centre. But even if we grant this, how can we account for the numerous more or less dark holes in the Milky Way, the largest and most remarkable of which is the so-called "coal sack" in the southern hemisphere? Obviously we should have to assume the existence of a number of tunnels, drilled through the disc-like stratum, and by some strange sympathy all directed towards the spot where our solar system is situated. And the many small arms which stretch out from the Milky Way would have to be either planes seen edgeways or the convexities of curved surfaces viewed tangentially. The improbability of these various assumptions is very great. But evidence is not wanting that the relatively bright stars are crowded together along the same zone where the excessively faint ones are so closely packed. The late Mr. Proctor plotted all the stars which occur in Argelander's great atlas of the northern hemisphere, 324,198 in number, on a single chart, and though these stars are all above the tenth magnitude, and thus superior in brightness to that innumerable host of stars of which the individual members are more or less lost in the galactic zone, and on the hypothesis of uniform distribution ought to be relatively near to us, the chart shows distinctly the whole course of the Milky Way by the clustering of these stars. This disposes sufficiently of the idea that the Milky Way is nothing but a disc-like stratum seen projected on the heavenly sphere; after this it is hardly necessary to examine Professor Barnard's photographs and see how fairly bright and very faint regions alternate without any attempt at regularity, in order to become convinced that the Milky Way is more probably a stream of stars clustered together, a stream or ring of incredibly enormous dimensions, inside which our solar system happens to be situated. But it must be admitted that it is premature to attempt to find the actual figure of this stream or to determine the relative distance of the various portions of it.


CHAPTER XXIII.


THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE STARS.

Star Spectroscopes--Classification of Stellar Spectra--Type I.,
with very Few Absorption Lines--Type II., like