Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/58

54 intervals grow faint, owing to the interposition of a dark companion. Twenty years ago, when photography was first applied to the discovery of variable stars, only about two hundred and fifty of these objects were known. Since then, three remarkable discoveries have been made, by means of which their number has been greatly increased. The first was by Mrs. Fleming, who, in studying the photographs of the Henry Draper Memorial, found that the stars of the third type, in which the hydrogen lines are bright, are variables of long period. From this property she has discovered 128 new variables, and has also shown how they may be classified from their spectra. The differences between the first, second and third types of spectra are not so great as those between the spectra of different variables of long period. The second discovery is that of Professor Bailey, who found that certain globular clusters contain large numbers of variable stars of short period. He has discovered 509 new variables, 396 of them in four clusters. The third discovery, made by Professor Wolf, of Heidelberg, that variables occur in large nebulæ, has led to his discovery of 65 variables. By similar work, Miss Leavitt has found 295 new variables. The total number of variable stars discovered by photography during the last fifteen years is probably five times the entire number found visually up to the present time. Hundreds of thousands of photometric measures will be required to determine the light curves, periods and laws regulating the changes these objects undergo.

A far more comprehensive problem, and perhaps the greatest in astronomy, is that of the distribution of the stars, and the constitution of the stellar universe. No one can look at the heavens, and see such clusters as the Pleiades, Hyades and Coma Berenices, without being convinced that the distribution is not due to chance. This view is strengthened by the clusters and doubles seen in even a small telescope. We also see at once that the stars must be of different sizes, and that the faint stars are not necessarily the most distant. If the number of stars was infinite, and distributed according to the laws of chance throughout infinite and empty space, the background of the sky would be as bright as the surface of the sun. This is far from being the case. While we can thus draw general conclusions, but little definite information can be obtained, without accurate quantitative measures, and this is one of the greatest objects of stellar photometry. If we consider two spheres, with the sun as the common center, and one having ten times the radius of the other, the volume of the first will be one thousand times as great as that of the second. It will, therefore, contain a thousand times as many stars. But the most distant stars in the first sphere would be ten times as far off as those in the second sphere, and accordingly if equally bright would appear to have only one hundredth part of the apparent brightness. Expressed in stellar magnitudes, they would be five magnitudes fainter. In reality, the total number of stars of the fifth magnitude and brighter is about 1,500;