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W. H. S. Monck, on the other hand, has suggested that new stars appear when dark bodies are rendered luminous by rushing through the gaseous fields of space, just as meteors kindle in our atmosphere. The idea, which has been revived and elaborated by Dr. Seeliger of Munich, is ingenious, but was not designed to apply to our present case.
But the movements of the third star are erratic, and inexplicable except upon the hypothesis advanced by Seeliger, that there is an invisible, or dark, star near it by whose attraction its motion is perturbed.
This brings us directly back to ``Nova Persei, for among the many suggestions offered to explain its outburst, as well as those of other temporary stars, one of the most fruitful is that of a collision between a star and a vast invisible nebula. Professor Seeliger, of Munich, first proposed this theory, but it afterward underwent some modifications from others.
Professor Seeliger, however, replied that the darkening is due to the never-ending swarms of their separate shadows transiting the planet's disc. Sunlight is not, indeed, wholly excluded. Many rays come and go between the open ranks of the meteorites. For the dusky ring is transparent. The planet it encloses shows through it, as if veiled with a strip of crape.
Did an extinguished sun, flying blindly through space, plunge into a vast cloud of meteoric particles, and, under the lashing impact of so many myriads of missiles, break into superficial incandescence, while the cosmical wrack through which it had driven remained glowing with nebulous luminosity? Such an explanation has been offered by Seeliger.
The whole ring-system, too, appears to be somewhat elliptical. The satellite-theory has derived unlooked-for support from photometric inquiries. Professor Seeliger pointed out in 1888 that the unvarying brilliancy of the outer rings under all angles of illumination, from 0° to 30°, can be explained from no other point of view.
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