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Updated: May 11, 2025
Plainly the solar system is not cut according to the Sirian fashion. We shall hardly find a more remarkable coupling of celestial bodies until we come, on another evening, to a star that began, ages ago, to amaze the thoughtful and inspire the superstitious with dread the wonderful Algol in Perseus.
Fortunately, in the case of Algol and some thirty or forty other stars, an extinct sun betrays its existence by flitting across the light of a luminous sun, and recent research has made it probable that the universe is strewn with dead worlds.
The light of Algol shines upon it a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its destination.
The magnitudes are three and eight, distance 9", p. 9°. An interesting multiple is zeta, two of whose stars at least we can see. The magnitudes are three, nine, ten, and ten, distances 13", p. 207°, 90", and 112". The chief attraction in Perseus is the changeful and wonderful beta, or Algol, the great typical star among the short-period variables.
Just as in finding Algol you were doing a little bit of practical work, proving something of which you had read, so by seeing this nebula you will remember more about nebulæ in general than by reading many chapters on the subject. This particular nebula is in Andromeda, and is not far from Algol; and it is not difficult to find.
Chandler has earned the right to have his hypotheses regarded with respect, even when they are as extraordinary as that which has just been described. It needs no indulgence of the imagination to lend interest to Algol; the simple facts are sufficient. How did that bright star fall in with its black neighbors? Or were they created together?
The name Algol is only a variation of Al-ghúl, the monster or demon, and it cannot be doubted that the demoniac, Gorgonian character assigned to this star was suggested by its ominous change, as though it were the eye of some fierce monster slowly winking amid the gloom of space. The southern scale of Libra meant bad fortune, while the northern was eminently fortunate.
The Arabs named the star Algol, or the Demon, on account of its eccentricity which did not escape their attention; and when Goodricke, in 1782, applied a scientific method of observation to it, the real cause of its variations was suggested by him, but his explanation failed of general acceptance until its truth was established by Prof. E. C. Pickering in 1880.
Doctor Anderson, of Edinburgh, an amateur astronomer, who had also been the first to see the new star in Auriga, beheld a strange object in the constellation Perseus not far from the celebrated variable star Algol. He recognized its character at once, and immediately telegraphed the news, which awoke the startled attention of astronomers all over the world.
Thus the observation, often repeated, and at different times of year, proves that in the case of the star Algol, the light of which takes at least four years to reach us, no sensible difference in coloration accompanies the changes in brilliancy.
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