Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/71

Rh slightly reddish tint. Watch it during the coming winter, and you will see it gradually fade from sight until, at last, only the blackness of the empty sky appears where, a few months before, a conspicuous and brilliant star was seen. Keep watch of that spot next summer, and in July you will perceive Mira shining there again—a mere speck, but slowly brightening—and next fall the wonderful star will blaze out again with renewed splendor.

Knowing that our own sun is a variable star—though variable only to a slight degree, its variability being due to the spots that appear upon its surface in a period of about eleven years—we possess some light that may be cast upon the mystery of Mira's variations. It seems not improbable that, in the case of Mira, the surface of the star at the maximum of spottedness is covered to an enormously greater extent than occurs during our own sun-spot maxima, so that the light of the star, instead of being merely dimmed to an almost imperceptible extent, as with our sun, is almost blotted out. When the star blazes with unwonted splendor, as in 1779, we may fairly assume that the pent-up forces of this perishing sun have burst forth, as in a desperate struggle against extinction. But nothing can prevail against the slow, remorseless, resistless progress of that obscuration, which comes from the leaking away of the solar heat, and which constitutes what we may call the death of a sun. And that word seems peculiarly appropriate to describe the end of a body which, during its period of visible existence, not only presents the highest type of physical activity, but is the parent and supporter of all forms of life upon the planets that surround it.

We might even go so far as to say that possibly Mira presents to us an example of what our sun will be in the course of time, as the dead and barren moon shows us, as in a magician's glass, the approaching fate of the earth. Fortunately, human life is a mere span in comparison with the æons of cosmic existence, and so we need have no fear that either we or our descendants for thousands of generations shall have to play the tragic róle of Campbell's "Last Man," or be induced to keep up a stout heart amid the crash of time by ungenerously boasting to the perishing sun, whose rays had nurtured us, that, though his proud race is ended, we have confident anticipations of immortality. I trust that, when man makes his exit from this terrestrial stage, it will not be in the contemptible act of thus kicking a fallen benefactor.

There are several other variable stars in Cetus, but none possessing much interest for us. The observer should look at the group of stars in the head, where he will find some interesting combinations, and also at the star Chi, which is the little star shown in the map near Zeta (ζ). This is a double that will serve as a very good test of eye and instrument, the smaller companion-star being of only seven and a half magnitude.