Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/315

Rh Harvard College Observatory has been remarkably successful in discovering variable stars by means of peculiarities in their spectra, as well as in classifying them, and in qualitative studies of many spectral details, using objective-prism spectrographs; but it is hoped that slit spectrographs, attached to powerful telescopes, may soon be devoted systematically to this subject, as it constitutes one of the richest fields now awaiting development.

A century and a half of meridian-circle observations has given to the world, as one of many priceless contributions, a knowledge of the proper motions of several thousand stars. Some of the ablest astronomers have used these results as a basis for determining the most probable elements of the sun's motion, and in studies upon the distribution of the stars in space. Unfortunately, these investigations necessarily involve assumptions as to the unknown distances of the stars.

A few years following the application of the spectroscope to the study of celestial objects, Huggins recognized that the Doppler-Fizeau principle supplied, in theory at least, the long hoped-for method of measuring the components of stellar motions in the line of sight—their radial velocities; and that the application of this method would enable us to determine both the direction and the speed of the solar motion, entirely independently of the distances of the stars. Efforts to apply this method met with signal failure for twenty years, and doubts even as to ultimate success were quite generally felt and freely expressed. The beginnings of success were made by Huggins and Pickering, in showing that photography reveals, with great clearness, the delicate spectral lines which the eye in purely visual observations is unable to see at all. In 1888, Vogel applied this knowledge in the first photographic attempt to measure radial velocities, and his work inaugurated a new era. His observations, obtained with a small telescope and imperfect spectrograph, were not sufficiently accurate to meet the needs of the principal sidereal problems, but they led to several brilliant discoveries at Potsdam, and were invaluable in marking out the path of progress. It was not until 1896 that the use of a powerful telescope, equipped with an efficient spectrograph, gave results accurate enough to satisfy present requirements. In fact, the accuracy obtained exceeded our most hopeful expectations.

It is not surprising that thirty years were required to develop successful methods. The work is so delicate that, unless suitable precautions are taken at every point in the process, the errors introduced may readily be larger than the quantities sought for. With the Mills spectrograph, for example, a speed of nine kilometers per second displaces the lines only 0.01 mm. The probable error of a velocity determination for the best stars, such as Polaris, is but one fourth of a kilometer per second, corresponding to a linear displacement of 0.0003