United States or Caribbean Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Every astronomer must many times have found himself marveling at it in those comparatively rare nights when it shows all its beauty and all its strangeness. In its great broken rifts, divisions, and spirals are found the gigantic prototypes of similar forms in its star-clouds and clusters. As we have said, it determines the general shape of the whole sidereal system.
Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in the sunbeams of Infinity. Star-Clouds, Star-Clusters, and Star-Streams
Photographs of such clusters are, perhaps, less effective than those of star-clouds, because the central condensation of stars in them is so great that their light becomes blended in an indistinguishable blur.
The cloud-like aspect of large parts of the Galaxy must always have attracted attention, even from naked-eye observers, but the true star-clouds were first satisfactorily represented in Barnard's photographs. The resemblance to actual clouds is often startling. Some are close-packed and dense, like cumuli; some are wispy or mottled, like cirri.
Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface to its present highly complex geographical condition.
In a small telescope it appears double, as if the suns composing it had divided into two parties which keep on their way side by side, with some commingling of their members where the skirts of the two companies come in contact. Smaller than either star-clouds or star-swarms, and differing from both in their organization, are star-clusters.
As for the rush of a star through a nebulous mass, that is a theory which would scarcely be entertained by any one acquainted with the enormous distances separating the gaseous star-clouds properly called nebulæ. There may be small clouds of the same sort scattered much more densely through space; but we have not a particle of evidence that this actually is the case.
Star-swarms, which are also characteristic features of the Galaxy, differ from star-clouds very much in the way that their name would imply i.e., their component stars are so arranged, even when they are countless in number, that the idea of an exceedingly numerous assemblage rather than that of a cloud is impressed on the observer's mind.
Still other examples of the same phenomenon are found in other parts of the sky. Of course, in the case of compact star-clusters, it is assumed that all the members share a like motion of translation through space, and the same is probably true of dense star-swarms and star-clouds.
As the astronomer, the more powerful his telescope, though it may resolve some of the nebulae that resisted feebler instruments, only has his bounds of vision enlarged as he looks through it, and sees yet other and mightier star-clouds lying mysterious beyond its ken so each new influx and tidal wave of knowledge of the Father, which Christ gives to His waiting child, leads on to enlarged desires, to longings to press still further into the unexplored mysteries of that magnificent and boundless land, and to nestle still closer into the infinite heart of God.
Word Of The Day