Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1877 — A New Star. [ARTICLE]

A New Star.

Since first this paper was written, anew star has appeared in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan.) On the evening of Nov. 24th, Prof. Schmidt, Director of the Athens Observatory, noticed there a star of the third magnitude. Not only was no star of that brightness there before, or any star visible to the naked eye, but it was found, when catalogues and charts came to be examined, that no star had ever been noted there, even in lists meant to include all stars down to the tenth magnitude. For instance, Argelander has made such a list, and charts from it, showing no less than 824,000 stars—that is, a hundred times as many as we can see on the darkest and clearest night; yet his list showed no star where the new one had appeared. Astronomers, however, do not suppose the new star is really new, except in the sense of being seen for the first time. They know that when last a new star appeared in Ulis way, it was found to be one of Argelander’s army of 324,000 stars, and watching that star (which had appeared in the constellation of the Northern Crown in May, 1866), they found that though it faded gradually out of sight to ordinary vision, the telescope could still follow it, until it had sunk to the tenth magnitude, at which degree of luster it remained and still remains. Ao doubt if we had had full lists of all stars down to.the fifteenth, or perhaps the twentieth, magnitude, we should have found that the new star in Cygnus was simply an old faint star which had brightened up suddenly, and remained for a time as one among the stars adorning our skies. Examined with an instrument called the spectroscope the new star gave a very strange account of itself. It was found to be emitting the same sort of light as other stars; but, beside that light, it emitted such light as comes from intensely-heated vapors. Among the vapors in that star thus (for the time) intensely hot, were hydrogen, the vapors of the metals sodium and magnesium, and a vapor known to be present in enormous quantities in our sun’s outer atmosphere, as seen during times of total eclipse. All these vapors surround our sun; and it is very probable that if anything caused our sun to blaze out with greatly increased light and heat, folks living oh a world circling round some other sun would find the same peculiarities in our sun’s light as we have found in the light of the new star in the Swan. What caused that star to blaze out in that strange way, we do not know. We should like to know, because we might then determine whether the cause which had so disturbed that sun might not be one from which our sun may one day suffer. Whatever the cause was, its effect did not to the fifth magnitude, in another week to

the sixth, in yet another to the seventh, since which time (Dee. 15th) it has very slowly diminished, and is still (Jan. sth) above the eighth magnitude. But although the unusual light and heat of that remote sun faded thus quickly away, yet if inhabited worlds circled around that sun, the cooling of their sun must have come far too late to save those creatures* lives. If our sun were to shine even but for twentyfour hours with several hundred times its usual heat, it is certain that every creature on the earth would be destroyed, and when the sun returned to its usual luster it would shine on a system of worlds on which not a single living creature was left.—Pref. jR. A, Proctor, in St. JfiAoku for April.