II THE PROGRESS OF MODERN ASTRONOMY A History of Science | ||
COMETS AND METEORS
Until the mathematician ferreted out the secret, it surely never could have been suspected by any one that the earth's serene attendant, “That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon,” could be plotting injury to her parent orb. But there is another inhabitant of the skies whose purposes have not been similarly free from popular suspicion. Needless to say I refer to the black sheep of the sidereal family, that “celestial vagabond” the comet.
Time out of mind these wanderers have been supposed to presage war, famine, pestilence, perhaps the destruction of the world. And little wonder. Here is a body which comes flashing out of boundless space into our system, shooting out a pyrotechnic tail some hundreds of millions of miles in length; whirling, perhaps, through the very atmosphere of the sun at a speed of three or four hundred miles a second; then darting off on a hyperbolic orbit that forbids it ever to return, or an elliptical one that cannot be closed for hundreds or thousands of years; the tail meantime pointing always away from the sun, and fading to nothingness as the weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it came. Not many times need the advent of such an apparition coincide with the outbreak of a pestilence or the death of a Cæsar to stamp the race of comets as an
It is true, a hard blow was struck at the prestige of these alleged supernatural agents when Newton proved that the great comet of 1680 obeyed Kepler's laws in its flight about the sun; and an even harder one when the same visitant came back in 1758, obedient to Halley's prediction, after its three-quarters of a century of voyaging but in the abyss of space. Proved thus to bow to natural law, the celestial messenger could no longer fully, sustain its rôle. But long-standing notoriety cannot be lived down in a day, and the comet, though proved a “natural” object, was still regarded as a very menacing one for another hundred years or so. It remained for the nineteenth century to completely unmask the pretender and show how egregiously our forebears had been deceived.
The unmasking began early in the century, when Dr. Olbers, then the highest authority on the subject, expressed the opinion that the spectacular tail, which had all along been the comet's chief stock-in-trade as an earth-threatener, is in reality composed of the most filmy vapors, repelled from the cometary body by the sun, presumably through electrical action, with a velocity comparable to that of light. This luminous suggestion was held more or less in abeyance for half a century. Then it was elaborated by Zöllner, and particularly by Bredichin, of the Moscow observatory, into what has since been regarded as the most plausible of cometary theories. It is held that comets and the sun are similarly electrified, and hence mutually repulsive. Gravitation vastly outmatches this repulsion in the
HEINRICH WILHELM MATTHIAS OLBERS
[Description: Image of HEINRICH WILHELM MATTHIAS OLBERS]But, theories aside, the unsubstantialness of the comet's tail has been put to a conclusive test. Twice during the nineteenth century the earth has actually plunged directly through one of these threatening appendages—in 1819, and again in 1861, once being immersed to a depth of some three hundred thousand miles in its substance. Yet nothing dreadful happened to us. There was a peculiar glow in the atmosphere, so the more imaginative observers thought, and that was all. After such fiascos the cometary train could never again pose as a world-destroyer.
But the full measure of the comet's humiliation is not yet told. The pyrotechnic tail, composed as it is of portions of the comet's actual substance, is tribute paid the sun, and can never be recovered. Should the obeisance to the sun be many times repeated, the train-forming material will be exhausted, and the comet's chiefest glory will have departed. Such a fate has actually befallen a multitude of comets which Jupiter and the other outlying planets have dragged into our system and helped the sun to hold captive here. Many of these tailless comets were known to the eighteenth-century astronomers, but no one at that time suspected
Checked in their proud hyperbolic sweep, made captive in a planetary net, deprived of their trains, these quondam free-lances of the heavens are now mere shadows of their former selves. Considered as to mere bulk, they are very substantial shadows, their extent being measured in hundreds of thousands of miles; but their actual mass is so slight that they are quite at the mercy of the gravitation pulls of their captors. And worse is in store for them. So persistently do sun and planets tug at them that they are doomed presently to be torn into shreds.
Such a fate has already overtaken one of them, under the very eyes of the astronomers, within the relatively short period during which these ill-fated comets have.
What had become of the fragments? At that time no one positively knew. But the question was to be answered presently. It chanced that just at this period astronomers were paying much attention to a class of bodies which they had hitherto somewhat neglected, the familiar shooting-stars, or meteors. The studies of Professor Newton, of Yale, and Professor Adams, of Cambridge, with particular reference to the great meteor-shower of November, 1866, which Professor Newton had predicted and shown to be recurrent at intervals of thirty-three years, showed that meteors are not mere sporadic swarms of matter flying at random, but exist in isolated swarms, and sweep about the sun in regular elliptical orbits.
Presently it was shown by the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli that one of these meteor swarms moves in the orbit of a previously observed comet, and other coincidences of the kind were soon forthcoming. The conviction grew that meteor swarms are really the débris of comets; and this conviction became a practical certainty when, in November, 1872, the earth crossed the orbit of the ill-starred Biela, and a shower
And so at last the full secret was out. The awe-inspiring comet, instead of being the planetary body it had all along been regarded, is really nothing more nor less than a great aggregation of meteoric particles, which have become clustered together out in space somewhere, and which by jostling one another or through electrical action become luminous. So widely are the individual particles separated that the cometary body as a whole has been estimated to be thousands of times less dense than the earth's atmosphere at sea-level. Hence the ease with which the comet may be dismembered and its particles strung out into streaming swarms.
So thickly is the space we traverse strewn with this cometary dust that the earth sweeps up, according to Professor Newcomb's estimate, a million tons of it each day. Each individual particle, perhaps no larger than a millet seed, becomes a shooting-star, or meteor, as it burns to vapor in the earth's upper atmosphere. And if one tiny planet sweeps up such masses of this cosmic matter, the amount of it in the entire stretch of our system must be beyond all estimate. What a story it tells of the myriads of cometary victims that have fallen prey to the sun since first he stretched his planetary net across the heavens!
II THE PROGRESS OF MODERN ASTRONOMY A History of Science | ||