The System of the Stars

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Adam & Charles Black, 1905 - 403 pages
 

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Page 340 - 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 349 - 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 333 - 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 351 - The nubecula 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 nebulae 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 • cluster of stars.1 " — " Cape ObseYvations," p. 146. In his
Page 353 - Cygnus, which he noticed to be "placed centrally in a very fine lacuna, void of faint stars, which surrounds the luminous cloud like a trench. The most striking feature with regard to this object is that the star-void halo encircling the nebula forms the end of a long channel, running eastward from the western nebulous clouds and their lacunae to a length of more than two degrees.
Page 339 - 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 349 - 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 354 - 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 stars, we add the fact that local regions of nebulae are regions where stars are scarce, and the further fact that single nebulae are habitually found in comparatively starless spots ; does not the proof of a physical...
Page 339 - 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...

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