A Short History of Astronomy, Arthur Berry [large screen ebook reader .TXT] 📗

years later he communicated a list of double stars to the newly founded Royal Astronomical Society. His last observation was taken almost at the same time, and he died rather more than a year afterwards (August 21st, 1822), when he was nearly 84.

He left one son, John, who became an astronomer only less distinguished than his father (chapter XIII., §§ 306-8). Caroline Herschel after her beloved brother’s death returned to Hanover, chiefly to be near other members of her family; here she executed one important piece of work by cataloguing in a convenient form her brother’s lists of nebulae, and for the remaining 26 years of her long life her chief interest seems to have been in the prosperous astronomical career of her nephew John.

257. The incidental references to Herschel’s work that have been made in describing his career have shewn him chiefly as the constructor of giant telescopes far surpassing in power any that had hitherto been used, and as the diligent and careful observer of whatever could be seen with them in the skies. Sun and moon, planets and fixed stars, were all passed in review, and their peculiarities noted and described. But this merely descriptive work was in Herschel’s eyes for the most part means to an end, for, as he said in 1811, “a knowledge of the construction of the heavens has always been the ultimate object of my observations.”

Astronomy had for many centuries been concerned almost wholly with the positions of the various heavenly bodies on the celestial sphere, that is with their directions. Coppernicus and his successors had found that the apparent motions on the celestial sphere of the members of the solar system could only be satisfactorily explained by taking into account their actual motions in space, so that the solar system came to be effectively regarded as consisting of bodies at different distances from the earth and separated from one another by so many miles. But with the fixed stars the case was quite different: for, with the unimportant exception of the proper motions of a few stars (chapter X., § 203), all their known apparent motions were explicable as the result of the motion of the earth; and the relative or actual distances of the stars scarcely entered into consideration. Although the belief in a real celestial sphere to which the stars were attached scarcely survived the onslaughts of Tycho Brahe and Galilei, and any astronomer of note in the latter part of the 17th or in the 18th century would, if asked, have unhesitatingly declared the stars to be at different distances from the earth, this was in effect a mere pious opinion which had no appreciable effect on astronomical work.

The geometrical conception of the stars as represented by points on a celestial sphere was in fact sufficient for ordinary astronomical purposes, and the attention of great observing astronomers such as Flamsteed, Bradley, and Lacaille was directed almost entirely towards ascertaining the positions of these points with the utmost accuracy or towards observing the motions of the solar system. Moreover the group of problems which Newton’s work suggested naturally concentrated the attention of eighteenth-century astronomers on the solar system, though even from this point of view the construction of star catalogues had considerable value as providing reference points which could be used for fixing the positions of the members of the solar system.

Almost the only exception to this general tendency consisted in the attempts—hitherto unsuccessful—to find the parallaxes and hence the distances of some of the fixed stars, a problem which, though originally suggested by the Coppernican controversy, had been recognised as possessing great intrinsic interest.

Herschel therefore struck out an entirely new path when he began to study the sidereal system per se and the mutual relations of its members. From this point of view the sun, with its attendant planets, became one of an innumerable host of stars, which happened to have received a fictitious importance from the accident that we inhabited one member of its system.

258. A complete knowledge of the positions in space of the stars would of course follow from the measurement of the parallax (chapter VI., § 129 and chapter X., § 207) of each. The failure of such astronomers as Bradley to get the parallax of any one star was enough to shew the hopelessness of this general undertaking, and, although Herschel did make an attack on the parallax problem (§ 263), he saw that the question of stellar distribution in space, if to be answered at all, required some simpler if less reliable method capable of application on a large scale.

Accordingly he devised (1784) his method of star-gauging. The most superficial view of the sky shews that the stars visible to the naked eye are very unequally distributed on the celestial sphere; the same is true when the fainter stars visible in a telescope are taken into account. If two portions of the sky of the same apparent or angular magnitude are compared, it may be found that the first contains many times as many stars as the second. If we realise that the stars are not actually on a sphere but are scattered through space at different distances from us, we can explain this inequality of distribution on the sky as due to either a real inequality of distribution in space, or to a difference in the distance to which the sidereal system extends in the directions in which the two sets of stars lie. The first region on the sky may correspond to a region of space in which the stars are really clustered together, or may represent a direction in which the sidereal system extends to a greater distance, so that the accumulation of layer after layer of stars lying behind one another produces the apparent density of distribution. In the same way, if we are standing in a wood and the wood appears less thick in one direction than in another, it may be because the trees are really more thinly planted there or because in that direction the edge of the wood is nearer.