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

mind towards the end of his life. When he first used his great 20-foot telescope to explore the Milky Way, he thought that he had succeeded in completely resolving its faint cloudy light into component stars, and had thus penetrated to the end of the Milky Way; but afterwards he was convinced that this was not the case, but that there remained cloudy portions which—whether on account of their remoteness or for other reasons—his telescopes were unable to resolve into stars (cf. fig. 104, facing p. 405).

In both these respects therefore the structure of the Milky Way appeared to him finally less simple than at first.

263. One of the most notable of Herschel’s discoveries was a bye-product of an inquiry of an entirely different character. Just as Bradley in trying to find the parallax of a star discovered aberration and nutation (chapter X., § 207), so also the same problem in Herschel’s hands led to the discovery of double stars. He proposed to employ Galilei’s differential or double-star method (chapter VI., § 129), in which the minute shift of a star’s position, due to the earth’s motion round the sun, is to be detected not by measuring its angular distance from standard points on the celestial sphere such as the pole or the zenith, but by observing the variations in its distance from some star close to it, which from its faintness or for some other reason might be supposed much further off and therefore less affected by the earth’s motion.

With this object in view Herschel set to work to find pairs of stars close enough together to be suitable for his purpose, and, with his usual eagerness to see and to record all that could be seen, gathered in an extensive harvest of such objects. The limit of distance between the two members of a pair beyond which he did not think it worth while to go was 2′, an interval imperceptible to the naked eye except in cases of quite abnormally acute sight. In other words, the two stars—even if bright enough to be visible—would always appear as one to the ordinary eye. A first catalogue of such pairs, each forming what may be called a double star, was published early in 1782 and contained 269, of which 227 were new discoveries; a second catalogue of 434 was presented to the Royal Society at the end of 1784; and his last paper, sent to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1821 and published in the first volume of its memoirs, contained a list of 145 more. In addition to the position of each double star the angular distance between the two members, the direction of the line joining them, and the brightness of each were noted. In some cases also curious contrasts in the colour of the two components were observed. There were also not a few cases in which not merely two, but three, four, or more stars were found close enough to one another to be reckoned as forming a multiple star.

Herschel had begun with the idea that a double star was due to a merely accidental coincidence in the direction of two stars which had no connection with one another and one of which might be many times as remote as the other. It had, however, been pointed out by Michell (chapter X., § 219), as early as 1767, that even the few double stars then known afforded examples of coincidences which were very improbable as the result of mere random distribution of stars. A special case may be taken to make the argument clearer, though Michell’s actual reasoning was not put into a numerical form. The bright star Castor (in the Twins) had for some time been known to consist of two stars, α and β, rather less than 5″ apart. Altogether there are about 50 stars of the same order of brightness as α, and 400 like β. Neither set of stars shews any particular tendency to be distributed in any special way over the celestial sphere. So that the question of probabilities becomes: if there are 50 stars of one sort and 400 of another distributed at random over the whole celestial sphere, the two distributions having no connection with one another, what is the chance that one of the first set of stars should be within 5″ of one of the second set? The chance is about the same as that, if 50 grains of wheat and 400 of barley are scattered at random in a field of 100 acres, one grain of wheat should be found within half an inch of a grain of barley. The odds against such a possibility are clearly very great and can be shewn to be more than 300,000 to one. These are the odds against the existence—without some real connection between the members—of a single double star like Castor; but when Herschel began to discover double stars by the hundred the improbability was enormously increased. In his first paper Herschel gave as his opinion that “it is much too soon to form any theories of small stars revolving round large ones,” a remark shewing that the idea had been considered; and in 1784 Michell returned to the subject, and expressed the opinion that the odds in favour of a physical relation between the members of Herschel’s newly discovered double stars were “beyond arithmetic.”

264. Twenty years after the publication of his first catalogue Herschel was of Michell’s opinion, but was now able to support it by evidence of an entirely novel and much more direct character. A series of observations of Castor, presented in two papers published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1803 and 1804, which were fortunately supplemented by an observation of Bradley’s in 1759, had shewn a progressive alteration in the direction of the line joining its two components, of such a character as to leave no doubt that the two stars were revolving round one another; and there were five other cases in which a similar motion was observed. In these six cases it was thus shewn that the double star was really formed by a connected pair of stars near enough to influence one another’s motion. A double star of this kind is called a binary star or a physical double star, as distinguished from a merely optical double star, the two members of which have no connection with one another. In three cases, including Castor, the observations were enough to enable the period of a complete revolution of one star round another, assumed to go on at a uniform rate, to be at any rate roughly estimated, the results given by Herschel being 342 years for Castor,157 375 and 1,200 years for the other two. It was an obvious inference that the motion of revolution observed in a binary star was due to the mutual gravitation of its members, though Herschel’s data were not enough to determine with any precision the law of the motion, and it was not till five years after his death that the first attempt was made to shew that the orbit of a binary star was such as would follow from, or at any rate would be consistent with, the mutual gravitation of its members (chapter XIII., § 309: cf. also fig. 101). This may be regarded as the first direct evidence of the extension of the law of gravitation to regions outside the solar system.

Although only a few double stars were thus definitely shewn to be binary, there was no reason why many others should not be so also, their motion not having been rapid enough to be clearly noticeable during the quarter of a century or so over which Herschel’s observations extended; and this probability entirely destroyed the utility of double stars for the particular purpose for which Herschel had originally sought them. For if a double star is binary, then the two members are approximately at the same distance from the earth and therefore equally affected by the earth’s motion, whereas for the purpose of finding the parallax it is essential that one should be much more remote than the other. But the discovery which he had made appeared to him far more interesting than that which he had attempted but failed to make; in his own picturesque language, he had, like Saul, gone out to seek his father’s asses and had found a kingdom.

265. It had been known since Halley’s time (chapter X., § 203) that certain stars had proper motions on the celestial sphere, relative to the general body of stars. The conviction, that had been gradually strengthening among astronomers, that the sun is only one of the fixed stars, suggested the possibility that the sun, like other stars, might have a motion in space. Thomas Wright, Lambert, and others had speculated on the subject, and Tobias Mayer (chapter X., §§ 225-6) had shewn how to look for such a motion.

If a single star appears to move, then by the principle of relative motion (chapter IV., § 77) this may be explained equally well by a motion of the star or by a motion of the observer, or by a combination of the two; and since in this problem the internal motions of the solar system may be ignored, this motion of the observer may be identified with that of the sun. When the proper motions of several stars are observed, a motion of the sun only is in general inadequate to explain them, but they may be regarded as due either solely to the motions in space of the stars or to combinations of these with some motion of the sun. If now the stars be regarded as motionless and the sun be moving towards a particular point on the celestial sphere, then by an obvious effect of perspective the stars near that point will appear to recede from it and one another on the celestial sphere, while those in the opposite region will approach one another, the magnitude of these changes depending on the rapidity of the sun’s motion and on the nearness of the stars in question. The effect is exactly of the same nature as that produced when, on looking along a street at night, two lamps on opposite sides of the street at some distance from us appear close together, but as we walk down the street towards them they appear to become more and more separated from one another. In the figure, for example, L and L′ as seen from B appear farther apart than when seen from A.