Astronomy: The Science of the Heavenly Bodies Part 6

Halley's span of existence did not permit his living to see even the first of these now historic verifications. But we in our day may emphatically term the epoch of the third verified return _Annus Halleia.n.u.s_.

Says Turner, Halley's successor in the Savilian chair at Oxford to-day: "There can be no more complete or more sensational proof of a scientific law, than to predict events by means of it. Halley was deservedly the first to perform this great service for Newton's Law of Gravitation, and he would have rejoiced to think how conspicuous a part England was to play in the subsequent prediction of the existence of Neptune."

Halley rose rapidly among the chief astronomical figures of his day. But he had little veneration for mere authority, and the significant veering of his religious views toward heterodoxy was for years an obstacle to his advance.

Still Halley the astronomer was great enough to question any contemporary dicta that seemed to rest on authority alone. Everyone called the stars "fixed" stars; but Halley doubting this, made the first discovery of a star's individual motion--proper motion, as astronomers say. To-day, two hundred years after, every star is considered to be in motion, and astronomers are ascertaining their real motions in the celestial s.p.a.ces to a nicety undreamed of by even the exacting Halley.

The moon, of priceless service to the early navigator, was regarded by all astronomers as endowed with an average rate of motion round the earth that did not vary from age to age. But Halley questioned this too; and on comparing with the ancient value from Chaldean eclipses, he made another discovery--the secular acceleration of the moon's mean motion, as it is technically termed. This was a colossal discovery in celestial dynamics; and the reason underlying it lay hidden in Newton's law for yet another century, till the keener mathematics of Laplace detected its true origin.

With Newton, Halley laid down the firm foundations of celestial mechanics, and they pushed the science as far as the mathematics of their day would permit. Halley, however, was not content with elucidating the motion of bodies nearest the earth, and pressed to the utmost confines of the solar system known to him. Here, too, he made a signal discovery of that mutual disturbance of the planets in their motion round the sun, called the great inequality of Jupiter and Saturn.

Halley's versatile genius attacked all the great problems of the day.

His observation of the sun's total eclipse in 1715 is the earliest reliable account of such a phenomenon by a trained astronomer. He described the corona minutely and was the first to see that other interesting phenomenon which only an alert observer can detect, which a great astronomer of a later day compared to the "ignition of a fine train of gunpowder," and which has ever since borne the name of "Baily's beads."

Besides being a great astronomer, Halley was a man of affairs as well, which Newton, although the greater mathematician, was not. Without Halley, Newton's superb discovery might easily have been lost to the age and nation, for the latter was bent merely on making discoveries, and on speculative contemplation of them, with never a thought of publis.h.i.+ng to the world.

Halley, more practical and businesslike, insisted on careful writing out and publication. Newton was then only forty-two, and Halley fully fourteen years his junior. But the philosophers of that day were keenly alive to the mystery of Kepler's laws, and Halley was fully conscious of the grandeur and far-reaching significance of Newton's great generalization which embodied all three of Kepler's laws in one.

Newton at last yielded, though reluctantly, and the "Principia" was given to the world, though wholly at Halley's private charges.

But Halley was far from being completely engrossed with the absorbing problems of the sky; things terrestrial held for years his undivided attention. Imagine present-day Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty intrusting a s.h.i.+p of the British navy to civilian command. Yet such was their confidence in Halley that he was commissioned as captain of H.

M.'s pink _Paramour_ in 1698, with instructions to proceed to southern seas for geographical discoveries, and for improving knowledge of the longitude problem, and of the variations of the compa.s.s. Trade winds and monsoons, charts of magnetic variation, tides and surveys of the Channel coast, and experiments with diving bells were practical activities that occupied his attention.

Halley in 1720 became Astronomer Royal. He was the second inc.u.mbent of this great office, but the first to supply the Royal Observatory with instruments of its own, some of which adorn its walls even to-day. His long series of lunar observations and his magnetic researches were of immense practical value in navigation.

Halley lived to a ripe old age and left the world vastly better than he found it. His rise from humblest obscurity was most remarkable, and he lived to gratify all the ambitions of his early manhood. "Of attractive appearance, pleasing manners, and ready wit," says one of his biographers, "loyal, generous, and free from self-seeking, he was one of the most personally engaging men who ever held the office of Astronomer Royal."

He died in office at Greenwich in 1742.

"Halley was buried," says Chambers, "in the churchyard of St.

Margaret's, Lee, not far from Greenwich, and it has lately been announced that the Admiralty have decided to repair his tomb at the public expense, no descendants of his being known." There is no suitable monument in England to the memory of one of her greatest scientific men.

In any event the collection and republication of his epoch-making papers would be welcomed by astronomers of every nation.

CHAPTER XVII

BRADLEY AND ABERRATION

Living at Kew in London early in the 18th century was an enthusiastic young astronomer, James Bradley. He is famous chiefly for his accurate observations of star places which have been invaluable to astronomers of later epochs in ascertaining the proper motions of stars.

The lat.i.tude of Bradley's house in Kew was very nearly the same as the declination of the bright star Gamma Draconis, so that it pa.s.sed through his zenith once every day. Bradley had a zenith sector, and with this he observed with the greatest care the zenith distance of Gamma Draconis at every possible opportunity. This he did by pointing the telescope on the star and then recording the small angle of its inclination to a fine plumb line. So accurate were his measures that he was probably certain of the star's position to the nearest second of arc.

What he hoped to find was the star's motion round a very slight orbit once each year, and due to the earth's motion in its...o...b..t round the sun. In other words, he sought to find the star's parallax if it turned out to be a measurable quant.i.ty.

It is just as well now that his method of observation proved insufficiently delicate to reveal the parallax of Gamma Draconis; but his a.s.siduity in observation led him to an unexpected discovery of greater moment at that time. What he really found was that the star had a regular annual orbit; but wholly different from what he expected, and very much larger in amount. This result was most puzzling to Bradley.

The law of relative motion would require that the star's motion in its expected orbit should be opposite to that of the earth in its annual orbit; instead of which the star was all the time at right angles to the earth's motion.

Bradley was a frequent traveler by boat on the Thames, and the apparent change in the direction of the wind when the boat was in motion is said to have suggested to him what caused the displacement of Gamma Draconis.

The progressive motion of light had been roughly ascertained by Roemer: let that be the velocity of the wind. And the earth's motion in its...o...b..t round the sun, let that be the speed of the boat. Then as the wind (to an observer on the moving boat) always seems to come from a point in advance of the point it actually proceeds from (to an observer at rest), so the star should be constantly thrown forward by an angle given by the relation of the velocity of light to the speed of the earth in orbital revolution round the sun.

The apparent places of all stars are affected in this manner, and this displacement is called the aberration of light. Astronomers since Bradley's discovery of aberration in 1726 have devoted a great deal of attention to this astronomical constant, as it is called, and the arc value of it is very nearly 20".5. This means that light travels more than ten thousand times as fast as the earth in its...o...b..t (186,330 miles per second as against the earth's 18.5). And we can ascertain the sun's distance by aberration also because the exact values of the velocity of light and of the constant of aberration when properly combined give the exact orbital speed of the earth; and this furnishes directly by geometry the radius of the earth's...o...b..t, that is the distance of the sun.

In fact, this is one of the more accurate modern methods of ascertaining the distance of the sun. As early as 1880 it enabled the writer to calculate the sun's parallax equal to 8".80, a value absolutely identical with that adopted by the Paris Conference of 1896, and now universally accepted as the standard.

In whatever part of the sky we observe, every star is affected by aberration. At the poles of the ecliptic, 23-1/2 degrees from the earth's poles, the annual aberration orbits of the stars are very small circles, 41" in diameter. Toward the ecliptic the aberration orbits become more and more oval, ellipses in fact of greater and greater eccentricity, but with their major axes all of the same length, until we reach the ecliptic itself; and then the ellipse is flattened into a straight line 41" in length, in which the star travels forth and back once a year. Exact correspondence of the aberration ellipses of the stars with the annual motion of the earth round the sun affords indisputable proof of this motion, and as every star partakes of the movement, this proof of our motion round the sun becomes many million-fold.

Indeed, if we were to push a little farther the refinement of our a.n.a.lysis of the effect of aberration on stellar positions, we could prove also the rotation of the earth on its axis, because that motion is swift enough to bear an appreciable ratio to the velocity of light.

Diurnal aberration is the term applied to this slight effect, and as every star partakes of it, demonstration of the earth's turning round on its axis becomes many million-fold also.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TELESCOPE

Had anyone told Ptolemy that his earth-centered system of sun, moon, and stars would ultimately be overthrown, not by philosophy but by the overwhelming evidence furnished by a little optical instrument which so aided the human eye that it could actually see systems of bodies in revolution round each other in the sky, he would no doubt have vehemently denied that any such thing was possible. To be sure, it took fourteen centuries to bring this about, and the discovery even then was without much doubt due to accident.

Through all this long period when astronomy may be said to have merely existed, practically without any forward step or development, its devotees were unequipped with the sort of instruments which were requisite to make the advance possible. There were astrolabes and armillary spheres, with crudely divided circles, and the excellent work done with them only shows the genius of many of the early astronomers who had nothing better to work with. Regarding star-places made with instruments fixed in the meridian, Bessel, often called the father of practical astronomy, used to say that, even if you provided a bad observer with the best of instruments, a genius could surpa.s.s him with a gun barrel and a cart wheel.

Before the days of telescopes, that is, prior to the seventeenth century, it was not known whether any of the planets except the earth had a moon or not; consequently the ma.s.ses of these planets were but very imperfectly ascertained; the phases of Mercury and Venus were merely conjectured; what were the actual dimensions of the planets could only be guessed at; the approximate distances of sun, moon, and planets were little better than guesses; the distances of the stars were wildly inaccurate; and the positions of the stars on the celestial sphere, and of sun, moon, and planets among them were far removed from modern standards of precision--all because the telescope had not yet become available as an optical adjunct to increase the power of the human eye and enable it to see as if distances were in considerable measure annihilated.

Galileo almost universally is said to have been the inventor of the telescope, but intimate research into the question would appear to give the honor of that original invention to another, in another country.

What Galileo deserves the highest praise for, however, is the reinvention independently of an "optick tube" by which he could bring distant objects apparently much nearer to him; and being an astronomer, he was by universal acknowledgment first of all men to turn a telescope on the heavenly bodies. This was in the year 1609, and his first discovery was the phase of Venus, his second the four Medicean moons or satellites of Jupiter, discoveries which at that epoch were of the highest significance in establis.h.i.+ng the truth of the Copernican system beyond the shadow of doubt.

But the first telescopes of which we have record were made, so far as can now be ascertained, in Holland very early in the 17th century.

Metius, a professor of mathematics, and Jansen and Lipperhey, who were opticians in Middelburg--all three are ent.i.tled to consideration as claimants of the original invention of the telescope. But that such an instrument was pretty well known would appear to be shown by his government's refusal of a patent to Lipperhey in 1608; while the officials recognizing the value of such an instrument for purposes of war, got him to construct several telescopes and ordered him to keep the invention a secret.

Within a year Galileo heard that an instrument was in use in Holland by which it was possible to see distant objects as if near at hand. Skilled in optics as he was, the reinvention was a task neither long nor difficult for him. One of his first instruments magnified but three times; still it made a great sensation in Venice where he exhibited the little tube to the authorities of that city, in which he first invented it.

Galileo's telescope was of the simplest type, with but two lenses; the one a double convex lens with which an image of the distant object is formed, the other a double concave lens, much smaller which was the eye-lens for examining the image. It is this simple form of Galilean telescope that is still used in opera gla.s.ses and field gla.s.ses, because of the shorter tube necessary.

Galileo carried on the construction of telescopes, all the time improving their quality and enlarging their power until he built one that magnified thirty times. What the diameter of the object gla.s.s was we do not know, perhaps two inches or possibly a little more. Gla.s.s of a quality good enough to make a telescope of cannot have been abundant or even obtainable except with great difficulty in those early days.

Other discoveries by this first of celestial observers were the spots on the sun, the larger mountains of the moon, the separate stars of which the Milky Way is composed, and, greatest wonder of all, the anomalous "handles" (_ansae_, he called them) of Saturn, which we now know as the planet's ring, the most wonderful of all the bodies in the sky.

Since Galileo's time, only three centuries past, the progress in size and improvement in quality of the telescope have been marvelous. And this advance would not have been possible except for, first, the discoveries still kept in large part secret by the makers of optical gla.s.s which have enabled them to make disks of the largest size; second, the consummate skill of modern opticians in fas.h.i.+oning these disks into perfect lenses; and third, the progress in the mechanical arts and engineering, by which telescope tubes of many tons' weight are mounted or poised so delicately that the thrust of a finger readily swerves them from one point of the heavens to another.

As the telescope is the most important of all astronomical instruments, it is necessary to understand its construction and adjustment and how the astronomer uses it. Telescopes are optical instruments, and nothing but optical parts would be requisite in making them, if only the optical conditions of their perfect working could be obtained without other mechanical accessories.

In original principle, all telescopes are as simple as Galileo's; first, an object gla.s.s to form the image of the distant object; second the eyepiece usually made of two lenses, but really a microscope, to magnify that image, and working in the same way that any microscope magnifies an object close at hand; and third, a tube to hold all the necessary lenses in the true relative positions.