The New Heavens | Page 3

Fig. 2. The Great Nebula in Orion (Pease).
Photographed with the 100-inch telescope. This short-exposure photograph shows only the bright central part of the nebula. A longer exposure reveals a vast outlying region.]
The dominance of the sun as the central body of the solar system, recognized by Aristarchus of Samos nearly three centuries before the Christian era, but subsequently denied under the authority of Ptolemy and the teachings of the Church, was reaffirmed by the Polish monk Copernicus in 1543. Kepler's laws of the motions of the planets, showing them to revolve in ellipses instead of circles, removed the last defect of the Copernican system, and left no room for its rejection. But both the world and the Church clung to tradition, and some visible demonstration was urgently needed. This was supplied by Galileo through his invention of the telescope.
[Illustration: Fig. 3. Model by Ellerman of summit of Mount Wilson, showing the observatory buildings among the trees and bushes.
The 60-foot tower on the extreme left, which is at the edge of a precipitous ca?on 1,500 feet deep, is the vertical telescope of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Above it are the "Monastery" and other buildings used as quarters by the astronomers of the Mount Wilson Observatory while at work on the mountain. (The offices, computing-rooms, laboratories, and shops are in Pasadena.) Following the ridge, we come successively to the dome of the 10-inch photographic telescope, the power-house, laboratory, Snow horizontal telescope, 60-foot-tower telescope, and 150-foot-tower telescope, these last three used for the study of the sun. The dome of the 60-inch reflecting telescope is just below the 150-foot tower, while that of the 100-inch telescope is farther to the right. The altitude of Mount Wilson is about 5,900 feet.]
The crystalline lens of the human eye, limited by the iris to a maximum opening about one-quarter of an inch in diameter, was the only collector of starlight available to the Greek and Arabian astronomers. Galileo's telescope, which in 1610 suddenly pushed out the boundaries of the known stellar universe and brought many thousands of stars into range, had a lens about 2-1/4 inches in diameter. The area of this lens, proportional to the square of its diameter, was about eighty-one times that of the pupil of the eye. This great increase in the amount of light collected should bring to view stars down to magnitude 10.5, of which nearly half a million are known to exist.
It is not too much to say that Galileo's telescope revolutionized human thought. Turned to the moon, it revealed mountains, plains, and valleys, while the sun, previously supposed immaculate in its perfection, was seen to be blemished with dark spots changing from day to day. Jupiter, shown to be accompanied by four encircling satellites, afforded a picture in miniature of the solar system, and strongly supported the Copernican view of its organization, which was conclusively demonstrated by Galileo's discovery of the changing phases of Venus and the variation of its apparent diameter during its revolution about the sun. Galileo's proof of the Copernican theory marked the downfall of medi?valism and established astronomy on a firm foundation. But while his telescope multiplied a hundredfold the number of visible stars, more than a century elapsed before the true possibilities of sidereal astronomy were perceived.
[Illustration: Fig. 4. The 100-inch Hooker telescope.]
STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE
Sir William Herschel was the first astronomer to make a serious attack upon the problem of the structure of the stellar universe. In his first memoir on the "Construction of the Heavens," read before the Royal Society in 1784, he wrote as follows:
"Hitherto the sidereal heavens have, not inadequately for the purpose designed, been represented by the concave surface of a sphere in the centre of which the eye of an observer might be supposed to be placed.... In future we shall look upon those regions into which we may now penetrate by means of such large telescopes, as a naturalist regards a rich extent of ground or chain of mountains containing strata variously inclined and directed as well as consisting of very different materials."
On turning his 18-inch reflecting telescope to a part of the Milky Way in Orion, he found its whitish appearance to be completely resolved into small stars, not separately seen with his former telescopes. "The glorious multitude of stars of all possible sizes that presented themselves here to my view are truly astonishing; but as the dazzling brightness of glittering stars may easily mislead us so far as to estimate their number greater than it really is, I endeavored to ascertain this point by counting many fields, and computing from a mean of them, what a certain given portion of the Milky Way might contain." By this means, applied not only to the Milky Way but to all parts of the heavens, Herschel determined