The Children's Book of Stars
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Having found the Great Bear, you have only to draw an imaginary line between the two last stars forming the square on the side away from the tail, and carry it on about three times as far as the distance between those two stars, and you will come straight to the Pole Star. The two stars in the Great Bear which help one to find it are called the Pointers, because they point to it.
The Great Bear is one of the constellations known from the oldest times; it is also sometimes called Charles's Wain, the Dipper, or the Plough. It is always easily seen in England, and seems to swing round the Pole Star as if held by an invisible rope tied to the Pointers. Besides the Great Bear there is, not far from it, the Little Bear, which is really very like it, only smaller and harder to find. The Pole Star is the last star in its tail; from it two small stars lead away parallel to the Great Bear, and they bring the eye to a small pair which form one side of a square just like that in the Great Bear. But the whole of the Little Bear is turned the opposite way from the Great Bear, and the tail points in the opposite direction. And when you come to think of it, it is very ridiculous to have called these groups Bears at all, or to talk about tails, for bears have no tails! So it would have been better to have called them foxes or dogs, or almost any other animal rather than bears.
Now, if you look at the sky on the opposite side of the Pole Star from the Great Bear, you will see a clearly marked capital W made up of five or six bright stars. This is called Cassiopeia, or the Lady's Chair.
In looking at Cassiopeia you cannot help noticing that there is a zone or broad band of very many stars, some exceedingly small, which apparently runs right across the sky like a ragged hoop, and Cassiopeia seems to be set in or on it. This band is called the Milky Way, and crosses not only our northern sky, but the southern sky too, thus making a broad girdle round the whole universe. It is very wonderful, and no one has yet been able to explain it. The belt is not uniform and even, but it is here and there broken up into streamers and chips, having the same appearance as a piece of ribbon which has been snipped about by scissors in pure mischief; or it may be compared to a great river broken up into many channels by rocks and obstacles in its course.
The Milky Way is mainly made up of thousands and thousands of small stars, and many more are revealed by the telescope; but, as we see in Cassiopeia, there are large bright stars in it too, though, of course, these may be infinitely nearer to us, and may only appear to us to be in the Milky Way because they are between us and it.
Now, besides the few constellations that I have mentioned, there are numbers of others, some of which are difficult to discover, as they contain no bright stars. But there are certain constellations which every one should know, because in them may be found some of the brightest stars, those of the first magnitude. Magnitude means size, and it is really absurd for us to say a star is of the first magnitude simply because it appears to us to be large, for, as I have explained already, a small star comparatively near to us might appear larger than a greater one further away. But the word 'magnitude' was used when men really thought stars were large or small according to their appearance, and so it is used to this day. They called the biggest and brightest first magnitude stars. Of these there are not many, only some twenty, in all the sky. The next brightest – about the brightness of the Pole Star and the stars in the Great Bear – are of the second magnitude, and so on, each magnitude containing stars less and less bright. When we come to stars of the sixth magnitude we have reached the limit of our sight, for seventh magnitude stars can only be seen with a telescope. Now that we understand what is meant by the magnitude, we can go back to the constellations and try to find some more.
If you draw an imaginary line across the two stars forming the backbone of the Bear, starting from the end nearest the tail, and continue it onward for a good distance, you will come to a very bright star called Capella, which you will know, because near it are three little ones in a triangle. Now, Capella means a goat, so the small ones are called the kids. In winter Capella gets high up into the sky, and then there is to be seen below her a little cluster called the Pleiades. There is nothing else like this in the whole sky. It is formed of six stars, as it appears to persons of ordinary sight, and these stars are of the sixth magnitude, the lowest that can be seen by the naked eye. But though small, they are set so close together, and appear so brilliant, twinkling like diamonds, that they are one of the most noticeable objects in the heavens. A legend tells that there were once seven stars in the Pleiades clearly visible, and that one has now disappeared. This is sometimes spoken of as 'the lost Pleiad,' but there does not seem to be any foundation for the story. In old days people attached particular holiness or luck to the number seven, and possibly, when they found that there were only six stars in this wonderful group, they invented the story about the seventh.
As the Pleiades rise, a beautiful reddish star of the first magnitude rises beneath them. It is called Aldebaran, and it, as well as the Pleiades, forms a part of the constellation of Taurus the bull. In England we can see in winter below Aldebaran the whole of the constellation of Orion, one of the finest of all the constellations, both for the number of the bright stars it contains and for the extent of the sky it covers. Four bright stars at wide distances enclose an irregular four-sided space in which are set three others close together and slanting downwards. Below these, again, are another three which seem to fall from them, but are not so bright. The figure of Orion as drawn in the old representations of the constellations is a very magnificent one. The three bright stars form his belt, and the three smaller ones the hilt of his sword hanging from it.
If you draw an imaginary line through the stars forming the belt and prolong it downwards slantingly, you will see, in the very height of winter, the brightest star in all the sky, either in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. This is Sirius, who stands in a class quite by himself, for he is many times brighter than any other first magnitude star. He never rises very high above the horizon here, but on crisp, frosty nights may be seen gleaming like a big diamond between the leafless twigs and boughs of the rime-encrusted trees. Sirius is the Dog Star, and it is perhaps fortunate that, as he is placed, he can be seen sometimes in the southern and sometimes in the northern skies, so that many more people have a chance of looking at his wonderful brilliancy, than if he had been placed near the Pole star. In speaking of the supreme brightness of Sirius among the stars, we must remember that Venus and Jupiter, which outrival him, are not stars, but planets, and that they are much nearer to us. Sirius is so distant that the measures for parallax make hardly any impression on him, but, by repeated experiments, it has now been proved that light takes more than eight years to travel from him to us. So that, if you are eight years old, you are looking at Sirius as he was when you were a baby!
Not far from the Pleiades, to the left as you face them, are to be found two bright stars nearly the same size; these are the Heavenly Twins, or Gemini.
Returning now to the Great Bear, we find, if we draw a line through the middle and last stars of his tail, and carry it on for a little distance, we come fairly near to a cluster of stars in the form of a horseshoe; there is only one fairly bright one in it, and some of the others are quite small, but yet the horseshoe is distinct and very beautiful to look at. This is the Northern Crown. The very bright star not far from it is another first-class star called Arcturus.
To the left of the Northern Crown lies Hercules, which is only mentioned because near it is the point to which the sun with all his system appears at present to be speeding.
For other fascinating constellations, such as Leo or the Lion, Andromeda and Perseus, and the three bright stars by which we recognize Aquila the Eagle, you must wait awhile, unless you can get some one to point them out.
Those which you have noted already are enough to lead you on to search for more.
Perhaps some of you who live in towns and can see only a little strip of sky from the nursery or schoolroom windows have already found this chapter dull, and if so you may skip the rest of it and go on to the next. For the others, however, there is one more thing to know before leaving the subject, and that is the names of the string of constellations forming what is called the Zodiac. You may have heard the rhyme:
'The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,And next the Crab, the Lion shines,The Virgin and the Scales;The Scorpion, Archer, and He-goat,The Man that holds the watering-pot,The Fish with glittering tails.'This puts in a form easy to remember the signs of the constellations which lie in the Zodiac, an imaginary belt across the whole heavens. It is very difficult to explain the Zodiac, but I must try. Imagine for a moment the earth moving round its orbit with the sun in the middle. Now, as the earth moves the sun will be seen continually against a different background – that is to say, he will appear to us to move not only across our sky in a day by reason of our rotation, but also along the sky, changing his position among the stars by reason of our revolution. You will say at once that we cannot see the stars when the sun is there, and no more we can. But the stars are there all the same, and every month the sun seems to have moved on into a new constellation, according to astronomers' reckoning. If you count up the names of the constellations in the rhyme, you will find that there are just twelve, one for each month, and at the end of the year the sun has come round to the first one again. The first one is Aries the Ram, and the sun is seen projected or thrown against that part of the sky where Aries is, in April, when we begin spring; this is the first month to astronomers, and not January, as you might suppose. Perhaps you will learn to recognize all the constellations in the Zodiac one day; a few of them, such as the Bull and the Heavenly Twins, you know already if you have followed this chapter.
CHAPTER XII
WHAT THE STARS ARE MADE OF
How can we possibly tell what the stars are made of? If we think of the vast oceans of space lying between them and us, and realize that we can never cross those oceans, for in them there is no air, it would seem to be a hopeless task to find out anything about the stars at all. But even though we cannot traverse space ourselves, there is a messenger that can, a messenger that needs no air to sustain him, that moves more swiftly than our feeble minds can comprehend, and this messenger brings us tidings of the stars – his name is Light. Light tells us many marvellous things, and not the least marvellous is the news he gives us of the workings of another force, the force of gravitation. In some ways gravitation is perhaps more wonderful than light, for though light speeds across airless space, it is stopped at once by any opaque substance – that is to say, any substance not transparent, as you know very well by your own shadows, which are caused by your bodies stopping the light of the sun. Light striking on one side of the earth does not penetrate through to the other, whereas gravitation does. You remember, of course, what the force of gravitation is, for we read about that very early in this book. It is a mysterious attraction existing between all matter. Every atom pulls every other atom towards itself, more or less strongly according to distance. Now, solid matter itself makes no difference to the force of gravitation, which acts through it as though it were not there. The sun is pulling the earth toward itself, and it pulls the atoms on the far side of the earth just as strongly as it would if there were nothing lying between it and them. Therefore, unlike light, gravitation takes no heed of obstacles in the way, but acts in spite of them. The gravitation of the earth holds you down just the same, though you are on the upper floor of a house, with many layers of wood and plaster between you and it. It cannot pull you down, for the floor holds you up, but it is gravitation that keeps your feet on the ground all the same. A clever man made up a story about some one who invented a kind of stuff which stopped the force of gravitation going through it, just as a solid body stops light; when this stuff was made, of course, it went right away off into space, carrying with it anyone who stood on it, as there was nothing to hold it to the earth! That was only a story, and it is not likely anyone could invent such stuff, but it serves to make clear the working of gravitation. These two tireless forces, light and gravitation, run throughout the whole universe, and carry messages of tremendous importance for those who have minds to grasp them. Without light we could know nothing of these distant worlds, and without understanding the laws of gravity we should not be able to interpret much that light tells us.
To begin with light, what can we learn from it? We turn at once to our own great light-giver, the sun, to whom we owe not only all life, but also all the colour and beauty on earth. It is well known to men of science that colour lies in the light itself, and not in any particular object. That brilliant blue cloak of yours is not blue of itself, but because of the light that falls on it. If you cannot believe this, go into a room lighted only by gas, and hey, presto! the colour is changed as if it were a conjuring trick. You cannot tell now by looking at the cloak whether it is blue or green! Therefore you must admit that as the colour changes with the change of light it must be due to light, and not to any quality belonging to the material of the cloak. But, you may protest, if the colour is solely due to light, and light falls on everything alike, why are there so many colours? That is a very fair question. If the light that comes from the sun were of only one colour – say blue or red – then everything would be blue or red all the world over. Some doors in houses are made with a strip of red or blue glass running down the sides. If you have one in your house like that, go and look through it, and you will see an astonishing world made up of different tones of the same colour. Everything is red or blue, according to the colour of the glass, and the only difference in the appearance of objects lies in the different shades, whether things are light or dark. This is a world as it might appear if the sun's rays were only blue or only red. But the sun's light is not of one colour only, fortunately for us; it is of all the colours mixed together, which, seen in a mass, make the effect of white light. Now, objects on earth are only either seen by the reflected light of the sun or by some artificial light. They have no light of their own. Put them in the dark and they do not shine at all; you cannot see them. It is the sun's light striking on them that makes them visible. But all objects do not reflect the light equally, and this is because they have the power of absorbing some of the rays that strike on them and not giving them back at all, and only those rays that are given back show to the eye. A white thing gives back all the rays, and so looks white, for we have the whole of the sun's light returned to us again. But how about a blue thing? It absorbs all the rays except the blue, so that the blue rays are the only ones that come back or rebound from it again to meet our eyes, and this makes us see the object blue; and this is the case with all the other colours. A red object retains all rays except the red, which it sends back to us; a yellow object gives back only the yellow rays, and so on. What an extraordinary and mysterious fact! Imagine a brilliant flower-garden in autumn. Here we have tall yellow sunflowers with velvety brown centres, clustering pink and crimson hollyhocks, deep red and bright yellow peonies, slender fairy-like Japanese anemones, great bunches of mauve Michaelmas daisies, and countless others, and mingled with all these are many shades of green. Yet it is the light of the sun alone that falling on all these varied objects, makes that glorious blaze of colour; it seems incredible. It may be difficult to believe, but it is true beyond all doubt. Each delicate velvety petal has some quality in it which causes it to absorb certain of the sun's rays and send back the others, and its colour is determined by those it sends back.
Well then how infinitely varied must be the colours hidden in the sun's light, colours which, mixed all together, make white light! Yes, this is so, for all colours that we know are to be found there. In fact, the colours that make up sunlight are the colours to be seen in the rainbow, and they run in the same order. Have you ever looked carefully at a rainbow? If not, do so at the next chance. You will see it begins by being dark blue at one end, and passes through all colours until it gets to red at the other.
We cannot see a rainbow every day just when we want to, but we can see miniature rainbows which contain just the same colours as the real ones in a number of things any time the sun shines. For instance, in the cut-glass edge of an inkstand or a decanter, or in one of those old-fashioned hanging pieces of cut-glass that dangle from the chandelier or candle-brackets. Of course you have often seen these colours reflected on the wall, and tried to get them to shine upon your face. Or you have caught sight of a brilliant patch of colour on the wall and looked around to see what caused it, finally tracing it to some thick edge of shining glass standing in the sunlight. Now, the cut-glass edge shows these colours to you because it breaks up the light that falls upon it into the colours it is made of, and lets each one come out separately, so that they form a band of bright colours instead of just one ray of white light.
This is perhaps a little difficult to understand, but I will try to explain. When a ray of white light falls on such a piece of glass, which is known as a prism, it goes in as white light at one side, but the three-cornered shape of the glass breaks it up into the colours it is made of, and each colour comes out separately at the other side – namely, from blue to red – like a little rainbow, and instead of one ray of white light, we have a broad band of all the colours that light is made of.
Who would ever have thought a pretty plaything like this could have told us what we so much wanted to know – namely, what the sun and the stars are made of? It seems too marvellous to be true, yet true it is that for ages and ages light has been carrying its silent messages to our eyes, and only recently men have learnt to interpret them. It is as if some telegraph operator had been going steadily on, click, click, click, for years and years, and no one had noticed him until someone learnt the code of dot and dash in which he worked, and then all at once what he was saying became clear. The chief instrument in translating the message that the light brings is simply a prism, a three-cornered wedge of glass, just the same as those hanging lustres belonging to the chandeliers. When a piece of glass like this is fixed in a telescope in such a way that the sun's rays fall on it, then there is thrown on to a piece of paper or any other suitable background a broad coloured band of lovely light like a little rainbow, and this is called the sun's spectrum, and the instrument by which it is seen is called a spectroscope. But this in itself could tell us little; the message it brings lies in the fact that when it has passed through the telescope, so that it is magnified, it is crossed by hundreds of minute black lines, not placed evenly at all, but scattered up and down. There may be two so close together that they look like one, and then three far apart, and then some more at different distances. When this remarkable appearance was examined carefully it was found that in sunlight the lines that appeared were always exactly the same, in the same places, and this seemed so curious that men began to seek for an explanation.
Someone thought of an experiment which might teach us something about the matter, and instead of letting sunlight fall on the prism, he made an artificial light by burning some stuff called sodium, and then allowed the band of coloured light to pass through the telescope; when he examined the spectrum that resulted, he found that, though numbers of lines to be found in the sun's spectrum were missing, there were a few lines here exactly matching a few of the lines in the sun's spectrum; and this could not be the result of chance only, for the lines are so mathematically exact, and are in themselves so peculiarly distributed, that it could only mean that they were due to the same cause. What could this signify, then, but that away up there in the sun, among other things, stuff called sodium, very well known to chemists on earth, is burning? After this many other substances were heated white-hot so as to give out light, in order to discover if the lines to be seen in their spectra were also to be found in the sun's spectrum. One of these was iron, and, astonishing to say, all the many little thread-like lines that appeared in its spectrum were reproduced to a hair's-breadth, among others, in the sun's spectrum. So we have found out beyond all possibility of doubt some of the materials of which the sun is made. We know that iron, sodium, hydrogen, and numerous other substances and elements, are all burning away there in a terrific furnace, to which any furnace we have on earth is but as the flicker of a match.
It was not, of course, much use applying this method to the planets, for we know that the light which comes from them to us is only reflected sunlight, and this, indeed, was proved by means of the spectroscope. But the stars shine by their own light, and this opened up a wide field for inquiry. The difficulty was, of course, to get the light of one star separated from all the rest, because the light of one star is very faint and feeble to cast a spectrum at all. Yet by infinite patience difficulties were overcome. One star alone was allowed to throw its light into the telescope; the light passed through a prism, and showed a faint band of many colours, with the expected little black lines cutting across it more or less thickly. Examinations have thus been made of hundreds of stars. In the course of them some substances as yet unknown to us on earth have been encountered, and in some stars one element – hydrogen – is much stronger than in others; but, on the whole, speaking broadly, it has been satisfactorily shown that the stars are made on the same principles as our own sun, so that the reasoning of astronomers which had argued them to be suns was proved.
We have here in the picture the spectrum of the sun and the spectrum of Arcturus. You can see that the lines which appear in the band of light belonging to Sirius are also in the band of light belonging to the sun, together with many others. This means that the substances flaming out and sending us light from the far away star are also giving out light from our own sun, and that the sun and Sirius both contain the same elements in their compositions.
This, indeed, seems enough for the spectroscope to have accomplished; it has interpreted for us the message light brings from the stars, so that we know beyond all possibility of mistake that these glowing, twinkling points of light are brilliant suns in a state of intense heat, and that in them are burning elements with which we ourselves are quite familiar. But when the spectroscope had done that, its work was not finished, for it has not only told us what the stars are made of, but another thing which we could never have known without it – namely, if they are moving toward us or going away from us.
CHAPTER XIII
RESTLESS STARS
You remember we have already remarked upon the difficulty of telling how far one star lies behind another, as we do not know their sizes. It is, to take another similar case, easy enough to tell if a star moves to one side or the other, but very difficult by ordinary observation to tell if it is advancing toward us or running away from us, for the only means we have of judging is if it gets larger or smaller, and at that enormous distance the fact whether it advances or recedes makes no difference in its size. Now, the spectroscope has changed all this, and we can tell quite as certainly if a star is coming toward us as we can if it moves to one side. I will try to explain this. You know, perhaps, that sound is caused by vibration in the air. The noise, whatever it is, jars the air and the vibrations strike on our ears. It is rather the same thing as the result of throwing a stone into a pond: from the centre of the splash little wavelets run out in ever-widening circles; so through the air run ever-widening vibrations from every sound. The more vibrations there are in a second the shriller is the note they make. In a high note the air-vibrations follow one another fast, pouring into one's ear at a terrific speed, so that the apparatus in the ear which receives them itself vibrates fiercely and records a high note, while a lower note brings fewer and slower vibrations in a second, and the ear is not so much disturbed. Have you ever noticed that if a railway engine is sweeping-toward you and screaming all the time, its note seems to get shriller and shriller? That is because the engine, in advancing, sends the vibrations out nearer to you, so more of them come in a second, and thus they are crowded up closer together, and are higher and higher.