The System of the StarsAdam & Charles Black, 1905 - 403 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
61 Cygni 70 Ophiuchi absorption Algol appear Arcturus Astr astronomy Astroph binary blue bodies bright Cape Cassiopeia Catalogue centre century cluster colour companion components Cygni dark detected displacements distance double stars eclipses effect faint galactic gaseous globular clusters Harvard Annals Heliometer helium hence Huggins hydrogen Ibid interval Journ Kapteyn less Lick light Light-Curve lines luminous lustre magnitude star mass Max Wolf means measures Milky Monthly Notices movements nearly nebula Nova objects Observatory observed Ophiuchus orbit Orion Orion nebula pair parallax period Phil photographic Pickering planetary plates Pleiades Professor proper motions radial velocity radiation rays red stars refractor remarkable remote revolution satellite shining sidereal Sir John Herschel Sir William Sirian Sirius small stars solar southern space spectra spectroscopic Spectroscopic binary spectrum spiral stellar Struve sun's telescope tion Trans variable variable stars velocity visible visual William Huggins
Popular passages
Page 338 - On a very slight examination it will appear that this immense starry aggregation is by no means uniform. The stars of which it is composed are very unequally scattered, and show evident marks of clustering together into many separate allotments...
Page 345 - The question whether nebulae are external galaxies hardly any longer needs discussion. It has been answered by the progress of research. No competent thinker, with the whole of the available evidence before him, can now, it is safe to say, maintain any single nebula to be a star system of co-ordinate rank with the Milky Way.
Page 2 - This disregard is neither supercilious nor causeless. The constellations seem to have been almost purposely named and delineated to cause as much confusion and inconvenience as possible. Innumerable snakes twine through long and contorted areas of the heavens, where no memory call follow them ; bears, lions, and fishes, large and small, northern and southern, confuse all nomenclature, &c.
Page 329 - To God's eternal house direct the way; A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear Seen in the galaxy, that milky way Which nightly, as a circling zone, thou seest Powder'd with stars.
Page 347 - Major, like the Minor, consists partly of large tracts and ill-defined patches of irresolvable nebula, and of nebulosity in every stage of resolution, up to perfectly resolved stars like the Milky Way, as also of regular and irregular nebulas properly so called, of globular clusters in every stage of resolvability, and of clustering groups sufficiently insulated and condensed to come under the designation of
Page 352 - In that zone of celestial space where stars are excessively abundant, nebulae are rare ; while in the two opposite celestial spaces that are furthest removed from this zone, nebulae are abundant. Scarcely any nebulae lie near the galactic circle (or plane of the Milky Way) ; and the great mass of them lie round the galactic poles. Can this also be mere coincidence ? When to the fact that the general mass of nebulae are antithetical in position to the general mass of...
Page 337 - I judge to be entirely owing to our sun's position in this great firmament, and may easily be solved by his excentricity and the diversity of motion that may naturally be conceived amongst the stars themselves, which may here and there, in different parts of the heavens, occasion a cloudy knot of stars, as perhaps at E.
Page 345 - No competent thinker with the whole of the available evidence before him, can now, it is safe to say, maintain any single nebula to be a star system of co-ordinate rank with the Milky Way. A practical certainty has been attained that the entire contents, stellar and nebular, of the sphere belong to one mighty aggregation, and stand in ordered, mutual relations within the limits of one all-embracing scheme — all-embracing, that is to say, so far as our capacities of knowledge extend. With the infinite...
Page 261 - The general aspect of the greater part of the nebula is therefore that of an assemblage of curved wisps of luminous matter, which, branching outward from a common origin in the bright masses in the vicinity of the Trapezium, sweep towards a southerly direction, on either side of an axis passing through the apex, of the Regio Huygeniana, nearly in the angle of position 180°.
Page 337 - Such is, in effect, the spectacle afforded by a very large portion of the Milky Way in that interesting region near its point of bifurcation in Scorpio (arts. 789, 792,) where, through the hollows and deep recesses of its complicated structure we behold what has all the appearance of a wide and indefinitely prolonged area strewed over with discontinuous masses and clouds of stars which the telescope at length refuses to...