Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/415

§ 264] 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, 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, § 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