Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/313

Rh involved in the phenomena are extremely small, or the disturbances are but skin-deep. In any case, the novas afford little evidence as to the complete re-nebularization of dark bodies.

I spoke of the average temperature of a developing star as reaching a maximum near the solar stage, when the border-line between gaseous and liquid constitution is reached. This refers to the entire mass. The law of surface temperatures is quite a different one. The bright-line and helium stars seem to have hotter surfaces than the solar and red stars. The spectra which we observe are surface phenomena which indicate the temperatures of the radiating and absorbing strata. The maximum intensity of continuous radiations is higher up in the spectrum for the white stars than for the yellow and red, a safe indication of higher temperatures. The lines in white-star spectra are distinctly the enhanced lines thought to be produced by high temperatures. These facts are not inharmonious. Surface temperature is a function of the rapidity with which convection currents can carry heat from the interior to the surface. The comparatively low internal heat of white stars, delivered quickly at the surface by rapidly moving gases, may readily maintain higher atmospheric temperatures than the much hotter interiors of solar stars, whose circulation has the sluggishness of viscosity.

Sir William and Lady Huggins are inclined to assign greater importance to mass and density, as factors in evolution, than to temperatures. Their view is that under the influence of great surface gravity, the generation and radiation of heat is accelerated, and the life of the star is lived more rapidly. They have been led to this view, in part, by the apparent anomaly of double stars, in which the more massive primary is generally yellower than the less massive companion. The subject is one of great difficulty and importance, and, unfortunately, laboratory methods are on too small a scale of mass and pressure to solve the problem.

Up to the year 1800 only twelve variable stars were known. Chandler's catalogue dated 1888 contains 225 entries. The remarkable progress made by astronomical science in the past fifteen years is fairly indicated by the fact that in this interval the number of known variable stars increased from 225 to more than 1400. To Harvard College Observatory belongs the great credit of discovering nearly 900 of these objects.

In many respects variable stars constitute the most interesting class of objects in the heavens. The tens of millions of ordinary stars are undoubtedly growing older; and the tens of thousands of nebulas, from which stars will eventually be formed by processes of condensation, are undergoing transformation; but appreciable changes in the ordinary stars and in the nebulas proceed with extreme deliberation,