Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/28

8 Dr. Thomas D. Anderson turned out to be the writer of the anonymous post-card—his name modestly self-obliterated by the nova's light. He had detected the star on January 24, but had only verified it as a new one on the 31st. Harvard College Observatory then looked up its archived plates. The plates showed that it had appeared sometime between December 1 and 10. Its maximum had been attained on December 20, after which it declined, to record apparently another maximum on February 3 of the 3.5 magnitude. From this time its light steadily waned till on April 1 it was only of the 16th magnitude or $1⁄100000$ of what it had been. In August it brightened again and then waned once more.

Meanwhile its spectrum underwent equally strange fluctuations. At first it exhibited the bright lines characteristic of the flaming red solar prominences, the calcium, hydrogen, and helium lines flanked by their dark correlatives upon a continuous background, showing that both glowing and cooler gases were here concerned. The sodium lines, too, appeared, like those that come out in comets as they approach the furnace of the Sun. An outburst such as occurs in miniature in the solar chromosphere or outermost gaseous layer of the Sun was here going on upon a gigantic scale. A veritable spectral chaos next supervened, staying until