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Updated: May 19, 2025
And Tom for long intervals goes walking up and down, up and down, by the camp under the brassy sky or the gloaming under the brilliant star-clusters that hang over the desert plain, but never raising his eyes to them; kicking a tuft of grass or a hole in the sand now and then, and seeming to watch the progress of the track he is tramping out.
The human race was now to be counted in quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited worlds, but the tiny Med Ship seemed the least significant of all possible created things. It could travel between star-systems and even star-clusters, but it was not yet capable of crossing the continent of suns on which the human race arose.
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.
Some might be in the form of a wreath, like our own; some might be globular, like the great star-clusters in Hercules and Centaurus; some might be glittering circles, or disks, or rings within rings.
Vivid orchids and wonderful colored lichens smoldered upon the swarthy tree-trunks and where a wandering shaft of light fell full upon the golden allamanda, the scarlet star-clusters of the tacsonia, or the rich deep blue of ipomaea, the effect was as a dream of fairyland. In these great wastes of forest, life, which abhors darkness, struggles ever upwards to the light.
One of them, near a conspicuous star-cluster in Scorpio, M80, is interesting for having been the first of these strange objects noted by Herschel. Probably it was its nearness to M80 which suggested to his mind the apparent connection of such vacancies with star-clusters which we have already mentioned.
According to his view, the appearance known as the Milky Way is produced by a collection of irregularly condensed star-clusters, within which the sun is somewhat eccentrically placed.
It does not trouble them at all to see the watery spheres that round themselves into being out of the vapors floating over us; they are nothing but raindrops. But if a planet can grow as a rain-drop grows, why then It was a great comfort to these timid folk when Lord Rosse's telescope resolved certain nebula into star-clusters.
The number of stars down to the fourteenth magnitude may be taken at about 30,000,000; and that of all the stars visible in the greatest modern telescopes is probably about 100,000,000. Nebulae and Star-clusters. Our knowledge of nebulae really dates from the time of W. Herschel. In his great sweeps of the heavens with his giant telescopes he opened in this direction a new branch of astronomy.
Then, on the other hand, we have the observation of Herschel, since abundantly confirmed, that space is unusually vacant in the immediate neighborhood of condensed star-clusters and nebulæ, which, as far as it goes, might be taken as an indication that the assembled stars had been drawn together by their mutual attractions, and that the tendency to aggregation is still bringing new members toward the cluster.
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