The Unsolved Problems Of Astronomy

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Title:     The Unsolved Problems Of Astronomy
Author: Simon Newcomb [More Titles by Newcomb]

The reader already knows what the solar system is: an immense central body, the sun, with a number of planets revolving round it at various distances. On one of these planets we dwell. Vast, indeed, are the distances of the planets when measured by our terrestrial standards. A cannon-ball fired from the earth to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and continuing its course ever since with a velocity of eighteen hundred feet per second, would not yet be half-way to the orbit of Neptune, the outer planet. And yet the thousands of stars which stud the heavens are at distances so much greater than that of Neptune that our solar system is like a little colony, separated from the rest of the universe by an ocean of void space almost immeasurable in extent. The orbit of the earth round the sun is of such size that a railway train running sixty miles an hour, with never a stop, would take about three hundred and fifty years to cross it. Represent this orbit by a lady's finger-ring. Then the nearest fixed star will be about a mile and a half away; the next more than two miles; a few more from three to twenty miles; the great body at scores or hundreds of miles. Imagine the stars thus scattered from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and keep this little finger-ring in mind as the orbit of the earth, and one may have some idea of the extent of the universe.

One of the most beautiful stars in the heavens, and one that can be seen most of the year, is a Lyrae, or Alpha of the Lyre, known also as Vega. In a spring evening it may be seen in the northeast, in the later summer near the zenith, in the autumn in the northwest. On the scale we have laid down with the earth's orbit as a finger-ring, its distance would be some eight or ten miles. The small stars around it in the same constellation are probably ten, twenty, or fifty times as far.

Now, the greatest fact which modern science has brought to light is that our whole solar system, including the sun, with all its planets, is on a journey towards the constellation Lyra. During our whole lives, in all probability during the whole of human history, we have been flying unceasingly towards this beautiful constellation with a speed to which no motion on earth can compare. The speed has recently been determined with a fair degree of certainty, though not with entire exactness; it is about ten miles a second, and therefore not far from three hundred millions of miles a year. But whatever it may be, it is unceasing and unchanging; for us mortals eternal. We are nearer the constellation by five or six hundred miles every minute we live; we are nearer to it now than we were ten years ago by thousands of millions of miles, and every future generation of our race will be nearer than its predecessor by thousands of millions of miles.

When, where, and how, if ever, did this journey begin--when, where, and how, if ever, will it end? This is the greatest of the unsolved problems of astronomy. An astronomer who should watch the heavens for ten thousand years might gather some faint suggestion of an answer, or he might not. All we can do is to seek for some hints by study and comparison with other stars.

The stars are suns. To put it in another way, the sun is one of the stars, and rather a small one at that. If the sun is moving in the way I have described, may not the stars also be in motion, each on a journey of its own through the wilderness of space? To this question astronomy gives an affirmative answer. Most of the stars nearest to us are found to be in motion, some faster than the sun, some more slowly, and the same is doubtless true of all; only the century of accurate observations at our disposal does not show the motion of the distant ones. A given motion seems slower the more distant the moving body; we have to watch a steamship on the horizon some little time to see that she moves at all. Thus it is that the unsolved problem of the motion of our sun is only one branch of a yet more stupendous one: What mean the motions of the stars--how did they begin, and how, if ever, will they end? So far as we can yet see, each star is going straight ahead on its own journey, without regard to its neighbors, if other stars can be so called. Is each describing some vast orbit which, though looking like a straight line during the short period of our observation, will really be seen to curve after ten thousand or a hundred thousand years, or will it go straight on forever? If the laws of motion are true for all space and all time, as we are forced to believe, then each moving star will go on in an unbending line forever unless hindered by the attraction of other stars. If they go on thus, they must, after countless years, scatter in all directions, so that the inhabitants of each shall see only a black, starless sky.

Mathematical science can throw only a few glimmers of light on the questions thus suggested. From what little we know of the masses, distances, and numbers of the stars we see a possibility that the more slow-moving ones may, in long ages, be stopped in their onward courses or brought into orbits of some sort by the attraction of their millions of fellows. But it is hard to admit even this possibility in the case of the swift-moving ones. Attraction, varying as the inverse square of the distance, diminishes so rapidly as the distance increases that, at the distances which separate the stars, it is small indeed. We could not, with the most delicate balance that science has yet invented, even show the attraction of the greatest known star. So far as we know, the two swiftest-moving stars are, first, Arcturus, and, second, one known in astronomy as 1830 Groombridge, the latter so called because it was first observed by the astronomer Groombridge, and is numbered 1830 in his catalogue of stars. If our determinations of the distances of these bodies are to be relied on, the velocity of their motion cannot be much less than two hundred miles a second. They would make the circuit of the earth every two or three minutes. A body massive enough to control this motion would throw a large part of the universe into disorder. Thus the problem where these stars came from and where they are going is for us insoluble, and is all the more so from the fact that the swiftly moving stars are moving in different directions and seem to have no connection with each other or with any known star.

It must not be supposed that these enormous velocities seem so to us. Not one of them, even the greatest, would be visible to the naked eye until after years of watching. On our finger-ring scale, 1830 Groombridge would be some ten miles and Arcturus thirty or forty miles away. Either of them would be moving only two or three feet in a year. To the oldest Assyrian priests Lyra looked much as it does to us to-day. Among the bright and well-known stars Arcturus has the most rapid apparent motion, yet Job himself would not to-day see that its position had changed, unless he had noted it with more exactness than any astronomer of his time.

Another unsolved problem among the greatest which present themselves to the astronomer is that of the size of the universe of stars. We know that several thousand of these bodies are visible to the naked eye; moderate telescopes show us millions; our giant telescopes of the present time, when used as cameras to photograph the heavens, show a number past count, perhaps one hundred millions. Are all these stars only those few which happen to be near us in a universe extending out without end, or do they form a collection of stars outside of which is empty infinite space? In other words, has the universe a boundary? Taken in its widest scope this question must always remain unanswered by us mortals because, even if we should discover a boundary within which all the stars and clusters we ever can know are contained, and outside of which is empty space, still we could never prove that this space is empty out to an infinite distance. Far outside of what we call the universe might still exist other universes which we can never see.

It is a great encouragement to the astronomer that, although he cannot yet set any exact boundary to this universe of ours, he is gathering faint indications that it has a boundary, which his successors not many generations hence may locate so that the astronomer shall include creation itself within his mental grasp. It can be shown mathematically that an infinitely extended system of stars would fill the heavens with a blaze of light like that of the noonday sun. As no such effect is produced, it may be concluded that the universe has a boundary. But this does not enable us to locate the boundary, nor to say how many stars may lie outside the farthest stretches of telescopic vision. Yet by patient research we are slowly throwing light on these points and reaching inferences which, not many years ago, would have seemed forever beyond our powers.

Every one now knows that the Milky Way, that girdle of light which spans the evening sky, is formed of clouds of stars too minute to be seen by the unaided vision. It seems to form the base on which the universe is built and to bind all the stars into a system. It comprises by far the larger number of stars that the telescope has shown to exist. Those we see with the naked eye are almost equally scattered over the sky. But the number which the telescope shows us become more and more condensed in the Milky Way as telescope power is increased. The number of new stars brought out with our greatest power is vastly greater in the Milky Way than in the rest of the sky, so that the former contains a great majority of the stars. What is yet more curious, spectroscopic research has shown that a particular kind of stars, those formed of heated gas, are yet more condensed in the central circle of this band; if they were visible to the naked eye, we should see them encircling the heavens as a narrow girdle forming perhaps the base of our whole system of stars. This arrangement of the gaseous or vaporous stars is one of the most singular facts that modern research has brought to light. It seems to show that these particular stars form a system of their own; but how such a thing can be we are still unable to see.

The question of the form and extent of the Milky Way thus becomes the central one of stellar astronomy. Sir William Herschel began by trying to sound its depths; at one time he thought he had succeeded; but before he died he saw that they were unfathomable with his most powerful telescopes. Even today he would be a bold astronomer who would profess to say with certainty whether the smallest stars we can photograph are at the boundary of the system. Before we decide this point we must have some idea of the form and distance of the cloudlike masses of stars which form our great celestial girdle. A most curious fact is that our solar system seems to be in the centre of this galactic universe, because the Milky Way divides the heavens into two equal parts, and seems equally broad at all points. Were we looking at such a girdle as this from one side or the other, this appearance would not be presented. But let us not be too bold. Perhaps we are the victims of some fallacy, as Ptolemy was when he proved, by what looked like sound reasoning, based on undeniable facts, that this earth of ours stood at rest in the centre of the heavens!

A related problem, and one which may be of supreme importance to the future of our race, is, What is the source of the heat radiated by the sun and stars? We know that life on the earth is dependent on the heat which the sun sends it. If we were deprived of this heat we should in a few days be enveloped in a frost which would destroy nearly all vegetation, and in a few months neither man nor animal would be alive, unless crouching over fires soon to expire for want of fuel. We also know that, at a time which is geologically recent, the whole of New England was covered with a sheet of ice, hundreds or even thousands of feet thick, above which no mountain but Washington raised its head. It is quite possible that a small diminution in the supply of heat sent us by the sun would gradually reproduce the great glacier, and once more make the Eastern States like the pole. But the fact is that observations of temperature in various countries for the last two or three hundred years do not show any change in climate which can be attributed to a variation in the amount of heat received from the sun.

The acceptance of this theory of the heat of those heavenly bodies which shine by their own light--sun, stars, and nebulae--still leaves open a problem that looks insoluble with our present knowledge. What becomes of the great flood of heat and light which the sun and stars radiate into empty space with a velocity of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second? Only a very small fraction of it can be received by the planets or by other stars, because these are mere points compared with their distance from us. Taking the teaching of our science just as it stands, we should say that all this heat continues to move on through infinite space forever. In a few thousand years it reaches the probable confines of our great universe. But we know of no reason why it should stop here. During the hundreds of millions of years since all our stars began to shine, has the first ray of light and heat kept on through space at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, and will it continue to go on for ages to come? If so, think of its distance now, and think of its still going on, to be forever wasted! Rather say that the problem, What becomes of it? is as yet unsolved.

Thus far I have described the greatest of problems; those which we may suppose to concern the inhabitants of millions of worlds revolving round the stars as much as they concern us. Let us now come down from the starry heights to this little colony where we live, the solar system. Here we have the great advantage of being better able to see what is going on, owing to the comparative nearness of the planets. When we learn that these bodies are like our earth in form, size, and motions, the first question we ask is, Could we fly from planet to planet and light on the surface of each, what sort of scenery would meet our eyes? Mountain, forest, and field, a dreary waste, or a seething caldron larger than our earth? If solid land there is, would we find on it the homes of intelligent beings, the lairs of wild beasts, or no living thing at all? Could we breathe the air, would we choke for breath or be poisoned by the fumes of some noxious gas?

To most of these questions science cannot as yet give a positive answer, except in the case of the moon. Our satellite is so near us that we can see it has no atmosphere and no water, and therefore cannot be the abode of life like ours. The contrast of its eternal deadness with the active life around us is great indeed. Here we have weather of so many kinds that we never tire of talking about it. But on the moon there is no weather at all. On our globe so many things are constantly happening that our thousands of daily journals cannot begin to record them. But on the dreary, rocky wastes of the moon nothing ever happens. So far as we can determine, every stone that lies loose on its surface has lain there through untold ages, unchanged and unmoved.

We cannot speak so confidently of the planets. The most powerful telescopes yet made, the most powerful we can ever hope to make, would scarcely shows us mountains, or lakes, rivers, or fields at a distance of fifty millions of miles. Much less would they show us any works of man. Pointed at the two nearest planets, Venus and Mars, they whet our curiosity more than they gratify it. Especially is this the case with Venus. Ever since the telescope was invented observers have tried to find the time of rotation of this planet on its axis. Some have reached one conclusion, some another, while the wisest have only doubted. The great Herschel claimed that the planet was so enveloped in vapor or clouds that no permanent features could be seen on its surface. The best equipped recent observers think they see faint, shadowy patches, which remain the same from day to day, and which show that the planet always presents the same face to the sun, as the moon does to the earth. Others do not accept this conclusion as proved, believing that these patches may be nothing more than variations of light, shade, and color caused by the reflection of the sun's light at various angles from different parts of the planet.

There is also some mystery about the atmosphere of this planet. When Venus passes nearly between us and the sun, her dark hemisphere is turned towards us, her bright one being always towards the sun. But she is not exactly on a line with the sun except on the very rare occasions of a transit across the sun's disk. Hence, on ordinary occasions, when she seems very near on a line with the sun, we see a very small part of the illuminated hemisphere, which now presents the form of a very thin crescent like the new moon. And this crescent is supposed to be a little broader than it would be if only half the planet were illuminated, and to encircle rather more than half the planet. Now, this is just the effect that would be produced by an atmosphere refracting the sun's light around the edge of the illuminated hemisphere.

The difficulty of observations of this kind is such that the conclusion may be open to doubt. What is seen during transits of Venus over the sun's disk leads to more certain, but yet very puzzling, conclusions. The writer will describe what he saw at the Cape of Good Hope during the transit of December 5, 1882. As the dark planet impinged on the bright sun, it of course cut out a round notch from the edge of the sun. At first, when this notch was small, nothing could be seen of the outline of that part of the planet which was outside the sun. But when half the planet was on the sun, the outline of the part still off the sun was marked by a slender arc of light. A curious fact was that this arc did not at first span the whole outline of the planet, but only showed at one or two points. In a few moments another part of the outline appeared, and then another, until, at last, the arc of light extended around the complete outline. All this seems to show that while the planet has an atmosphere, it is not transparent like ours, but is so filled with mist and clouds that the sun is seen through it only as if shining in a fog.

Not many years ago the planet Mars, which is the next one outside of us, was supposed to have a surface like that of our earth. Some parts were of a dark greenish gray hue; these were supposed to be seas and oceans. Other parts had a bright, warm tint; these were supposed to be the continents. During the last twenty years much has been learned as to how this planet looks, and the details of its surface have been mapped by several observers, using the best telescopes under the most favorable conditions of air and climate. And yet it must be confessed that the result of this labor is not altogether satisfactory. It seems certain that the so-called seas are really land and not water. When it comes to comparing Mars with the earth, we cannot be certain of more than a single point of resemblance. This is that during the Martian winter a white cap, as of snow, is formed over the pole, which partially melts away during the summer. The conclusion that there are oceans whose evaporation forms clouds which give rise to this snow seems plausible. But the telescope shows no clouds, and nothing to make it certain that there is an atmosphere to sustain them. There is no certainty that the white deposit is what we call snow; perhaps it is not formed of water at all. The most careful studies of the surface of this planet, under the best conditions, are those made at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Especially wonderful is the system of so-called canals, first seen by Schiaparelli, but mapped in great detail at Flagstaff. But the nature and meaning of these mysterious lines are still to be discovered. The result is that the question of the real nature of the surface of Mars and of what we should see around us could we land upon it and travel over it are still among the unsolved problems of astronomy.

If this is the case with the nearest planets that we can study, how is it with more distant ones? Jupiter is the only one of these of the condition of whose surface we can claim to have definite knowledge. But even this knowledge is meagre. The substance of what we know is that its surface is surrounded by layers of what look like dense clouds, through which nothing can certainly be seen.

I have already spoken of the heat of the sun and its probable origin. But the question of its heat, though the most important, is not the only one that the sun offers us. What is the sun? When we say that it is a very hot globe, more than a million times as large as the earth, and hotter than any furnace that man can make, so that literally "the elements melt with fervent heat" even at its surface, while inside they are all vaporized, we have told the most that we know as to what the sun really is. Of course we know a great deal about the spots, the rotation of the sun on its axis, the materials of which it is composed, and how its surroundings look during a total eclipse. But all this does not answer our question. There are several mysteries which ingenious men have tried to explain, but they cannot prove their explanations to be correct. One is the cause and nature of the spots. Another is that the shining surface of the sun, the "photosphere," as it is technically called, seems so calm and quiet while forces are acting within it of a magnitude quite beyond our conception. Flames in which our earth and everything on it would be engulfed like a boy's marble in a blacksmith's forge are continually shooting up to a height of tens of thousands of miles. One would suppose that internal forces capable of doing this would break the surface up into billows of fire a thousand miles high; but we see nothing of the kind. The surface of the sun seems almost as placid as a lake.

Yet another mystery is the corona of the sun. This is something we should never have known to exist if the sun were not sometimes totally eclipsed by the dark body of the moon. On these rare occasions the sun is seen to be surrounded by a halo of soft, white light, sending out rays in various directions to great distances. This halo is called the corona, and has been most industriously studied and photographed during nearly every total eclipse for thirty years. Thus we have learned much about how it looks and what its shape is. It has a fibrous, woolly structure, a little like the loose end of a much-worn hempen rope. A certain resemblance has been seen between the form of these seeming fibres and that of the lines in which iron filings arrange themselves when sprinkled on paper over a magnet. It has hence been inferred that the sun has magnetic properties, a conclusion which, in a general way, is supported by many other facts. Yet the corona itself remains no less an unexplained phenomenon.

[Illustration with caption: PHOTOGRAPH OF THE CORONA OF THE SUN, TAKEN IN TRIPOLI DURING TOTAL ECLIPSE OF AUGUST 30, 1905]

A phenomenon almost as mysterious as the solar corona is the "zodiacal light," which any one can see rising from the western horizon just after the end of twilight on a clear winter or spring evening. The most plausible explanation is that it is due to a cloud of small meteoric bodies revolving round the sun. We should hardly doubt this explanation were it not that this light has a yet more mysterious appendage, commonly called the Gegenschein, or counter-glow. This is a patch of light in the sky in a direction exactly opposite that of the sun. It is so faint that it can be seen only by a practised eye under the most favorable conditions. But it is always there. The latest suggestion is that it is a tail of the earth, of the same kind as the tail of a comet!

We know that the motions of the heavenly bodies are predicted with extraordinary exactness by the theory of gravitation. When one finds that the exact path of the moon's shadow on the earth during a total eclipse of the sun can be mapped out many years in advance, and that the planets follow the predictions of the astronomer so closely that, if you could see the predicted planet as a separate object, it would look, even in a good telescope, as if it exactly fitted over the real planet, one thinks that here at least is a branch of astronomy which is simply perfect. And yet the worlds themselves show slight deviations in their movements which the astronomer cannot always explain, and which may be due to some hidden cause that, when brought to light, shall lead to conclusions of the greatest importance to our race.

One of these deviations is in the rotation of the earth. Sometimes, for several years at a time, it seems to revolve a little faster, and then again a little slower. The changes are very slight; they can be detected only by the most laborious and refined methods; yet they must have a cause, and we should like to know what that cause is.

The moon shows a similar irregularity of motion. For half a century, perhaps through a whole century, she will go around the earth a little ahead of her regular rate, and then for another half-century or more she will fall behind. The changes are very small; they would never have been seen with the unaided eye, yet they exist. What is their cause? Mathematicians have vainly spent years of study in trying to answer this question.

The orbit of Mercury is found by observations to have a slight motion which mathematicians have vainly tried to explain. For some time it was supposed to be caused by the attraction of an unknown planet between Mercury and the sun, and some were so sure of the existence of this planet that they gave it a name, calling it Vulcan. But of late years it has become reasonably certain that no planet large enough to produce the effect observed can be there. So thoroughly has every possible explanation been sifted out and found wanting, that some astronomers are now inquiring whether the law of gravitation itself may not be a little different from what has always been supposed. A very slight deviation, indeed, would account for the facts, but cautious astronomers want other proofs before regarding the deviation of gravitation as an established fact.

Intelligent men have sometimes inquired how, after devoting so much work to the study of the heavens, anything can remain for astronomers to find out. It is a curious fact that, although they were never learning so fast as at the present day, yet there seems to be more to learn now than there ever was before. Great and numerous as are the unsolved problems of our science, knowledge is now advancing into regions which, a few years ago, seemed inaccessible. Where it will stop none can say.

[The end]
Simon Newcomb's essay: Unsolved Problems Of Astronomy

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