THE GREAT NEBULA OF ORION.—Sir Robert S. Ball
The telescope, ever an ally in the study of the heavens, is in this part of the science absolutely indispensable. In other branches of astronomy we can learn something without its aid. Indeed, many great astronomical discoveries were made long before the telescope was invented. But ere this memorable event in the history of science it was impossible for us to know anything of the existence of the nebulæ. It is indeed true that there is one of these objects which can be just detected by the naked eye. It lies in the constellation of Andromeda, where, on a clear and dark night, a faint spot of light can just be discerned by a good eye. But a mere glimpse gives us really no adequate notion of the true character of the object. It might only, so far as the naked eye discloses its nature, be a cluster of stars like that we have already discerned in Perseus, or like the similar group that, under the name of the Beehive, is comparatively familiar in the constellation of Cancer. With the single exception of the nebula in Andromeda, all the objects so called are entirely telescopic, yet how important a constituent the nebulæ form in the contents of the heavens will be shown by a look at some of the lists of these objects. There are now several thousands of nebulæ known, and their positions in the sky, as well as the details of their appearances, are set forth in the catalogues.
The most glorious constellation of stars in the firmament is undoubtedly that of Orion. This splendid group is seen in the south during the winter months, and toward the close of January it is situated in a very convenient position for observing early in the evening. The group is specially characterized by the number of unusually bright stars which it includes, and the three stars in the centre, forming the so-called Belt of Orion, is as well known a celestial figure as the sky contains. Directly under the belt are three much smaller stars nearly in a line, which points straight upward to the middle star of the belt. These three lower stars are usually known as the sword handle of Orion, this being the position which they occupied in the fanciful old sketches of the constellation. The three stars of the sword handle of Orion are plunged in the Great Nebula. This object can not be seen by the unassisted eye, though doubtless around the central star a little haziness is perceptible, and even the slightest telescopic aid will suffice to indicate that the central star of the sword handle is attended by a surrounding glow of light, which renders it quite unlike other stars. This can indeed be sufficiently shown with an ordinary opera-glass, one glance through which will awaken in the beholder a keen desire to study the object under more favorable conditions. But to do justice to the object, telescopes of large power are desirable.
To realize fully the magnificence of the Great Nebula, the observer who is being introduced to the object for the first time should not, strange to say, direct the telescope at the nebula; the instrument should rather be pointed at the heavens, just a little to the west of the nebula. The clock driving the equatorial should not be started, and the observer should take his seat and look through the eye-piece before the nebula has entered the field. He will see, no doubt, a few stars on the black background, which gradually pass in procession across his field of view. This is merely the ordinary diurnal journey of the heavens, by which all the objects move slowly from east to west; I ought rather to say appear to move, for, of course, the motion on the heavens is only apparent, the fact being that it is the earth which is turning round.
After the observer’s eye for a minute or so has become familiarized with the dark aspect of the heavens under ordinary circumstances, he will begin to perceive on the eastern side (it will appear in the telescope no doubt as on the western side) a faint dawn of light. Gradually there will steal across his field of view a sort of ghostlike luminosity that is in marked contrast to the darkness in the rest of the field; as the seconds move on, this object will disclose itself until the full splendor of the Great Nebula comes into view; then the entire field will be filled with the light, and then it will gradually advance and gradually pass away again to emphasize the contrast between the brilliance of the nebula and the darkness of the sky. Unless this method is adopted, the full interest of a telescopic view of the Great Nebula is not attained, for when the entire field is full of the glow the beginner will hardly recognize the nebula. He will be apt to think that the fainter part of the field he sees is the ordinary groundwork of the sky, and this illusion can only be dispelled by enabling him to witness the actual contrast in the way I have described. The central portions of the nebula are, however, so brilliant and so wonderfully marked with interesting detail, that even a small instrument will suffice to reveal much of its beauties.
In the centre of the nebula is the star known to astronomers at Theta Orionis, the most prominent star of the sword handle. To the eye this looks like an ordinary star, but the telescope speedily dispels that notion. Theta Orionis is found to consist of four, or rather six, stars all so close together that the unaided eye fails to distinguish them separately. A structure so complex gives to this star quite a special, indeed a unique, interest, wholly apart from the marvelous nebula of which it is the focus. We must dwell a little on the peculiarities of this star. We are familiar with stars which are called double; there are indeed some ten thousand objects so designated known to astronomers and duly registered in catalogues.
Many of these double stars are objects of extreme telescopic beauty; sometimes they offer to our admiration a delightful contrast of colors; perhaps one will be topaz color and the other bluish, or on rare occasions a pair of emerald gems will be seen with an invisible band of mutual connection. Sometimes triple stars are found, in which three stars are obviously in alliance; but multiple stars of greater complexity are comparatively rare; and so marvelous a spectacle as Theta Orionis, in which no fewer than six stars are obviously an allied group, is almost unique. It is not a little remarkable that we find the most exquisite multiple star which the sky can show, beautifully framed or set in the centre of the grandest of the nebulæ. Of course it might conceivably happen that the apparent concourse of these objects was fortuitous. The actual phenomenon could be accounted for by the belief that the Great Nebula was either very much nearer or very much further than the multiple star, and that they chanced to lie in the same line of sight, and had no other connection. But to me it appears that this view is quite at variance with every reasonable probability; that the most wondrous multiple star should have happened to lie in line with the very centre of the most wondrous nebula would have been a coincidence against the occurrence of which the probabilities were almost infinite. There can scarcely be any doubt that the multiple star and the Great Nebula are part of the same system, and that the star is, in truth, placed in the middle of the nebula, as it actually appears to be.
And now as to the composition of this mysterious object.
The word nebula means, of course, a little cloud, but the expression is apt to be a misleading one. In a sense no doubt they are little, inasmuch as the patch of the sky which a nebula covers would be small compared with one of our ordinary clouds. Indeed, a nebula which covered as large an apparent part of the sky as the size of the moon would be ranked as a large object of its class, while even the greatest of them is perhaps not more than ten or twelve times as great. Nor is the word cloud, as applied to nebula, an appropriate one. What we mean by a cloud is only a vast mass of watery vapor raised by the sun from the sea, and poised aloft until such time as it shall be again dispersed into invisible water, or until it shall descend to the earth as rain. Such clouds are, of course, within the limits of our atmosphere, and are rarely more than a few miles above the earth’s surface. The light which renders clouds visible only comes from reflected sunbeams, and consequently at night clouds become invisible, though the astronomer is often only too unpleasantly made acquainted with their presence by the opacity with which they shut out the stars from his view.
Utterly different in all respects are the nebulæ. They are not masses of watery vapor. It may no doubt possibly be that water in some form is there, but it is not water which we see. We are looking at some gaseous material of a bluish hue. The light with which it glows is no reflected sunlight. The nebula is indeed indebted to no foreign source for that weird—I had almost said ghostlike—radiance which it gives forth. The light comes from the nebula itself. But how, it may well be asked, should a purely gaseous substance be able to radiate forth light? It is easy for us to comprehend how stars or suns or comparatively solid bodies can, in virtue of their tremendous temperature, glow with heat like red-hot or white-hot iron. It is true that flame is gas in an incandescent state, but in flame a vehement chemical union of oxygen with some other substance is in progress, and this is the source of the heat and the light that flame gives forth. We can not regard the Great Nebula in Orion as originating in anything resembling flame.
We can, however, in our physical laboratories arrange an experiment which seems to throw some light on the composition of the nebula. Into a glass tube a small quantity of hydrogen gas is admitted, the air having been previously extracted. Then, by means of two wires, one at each end of the tube, an electric current is transmitted through the gas. Here there is no combustion; the gas is merely the vehicle by which the electricity flows from one pole to the other. In doing so the gas instantly begins to glow with an intense bluish light, and a very beautiful effect is produced, which can be renewed or terminated at will by simply making or breaking the electric current. It would seem as if the gas we see in the nebula were in a condition somewhat analogous to the gas in the tube. I do not mean that the passage of electricity through the nebula is the source of its luminosity. There is, indeed, no ground for such a supposition. It is the property of electricity when passing through a conductor to warm that conductor; thus we know that if a powerful current be transmitted through a wire of the most infusible of all metals, platinum, the wire will not only get warm, but it may become red hot, white hot, and even melt under the influence of the heat which is generated. In those beautiful incandescent electric lamps which are now happily coming into extensive use a current of electricity flows through a filament of carbon, and kindles that exquisite incandescence which is maintained while the current flows. It would appear that so long as the electricity is flowing through the glass tube its action on the gas is to impart a very high temperature. It is in consequence of this temperature that the gas glows. Now we can offer a reasonable account of the luminosity of the Great Nebula in Orion. The particles of gaseous or vaporous material of which it is formed are of an extremely high temperature, sufficient to enable them to glow with the brilliancy which renders them visible.
It is now almost twenty years since a marvelous accession to our knowledge of such objects as the Great Nebula in Orion was made by Dr. Huggins. I have used our gas hydrogen as an illustration in describing the character of the nebula, but I have now to add that the presence of hydrogen is no mere fiction but a substantial verity. Truly we here open up one of the most marvelous chapters which science has to disclose. The chemist can analyze the different substances on the earth with his test tubes, and he can tell the elements of which they are composed. But in this old-fashioned chemistry it was at least reasonable for the chemist to demand a portion of the substance he was expected to analyze. Unless he were provided with a sample, how could it be possible for him to grind it up or submit it to the various operations of his laboratory? In these modern days the chemist can perform operations of which his predecessors never even dreamed. No doubt the old method is still used—nay, is indeed at this moment cultivated with greater skill and means than in any previous age—but side by side with the old method, and as an invaluable supplement thereto, the new method of chemical research, called spectrum analysis, has been created, and has already conducted to many profoundly interesting discoveries in the most varied branches of science.
In the application of the spectroscopic method it is not indispensably necessary that we actually have a fragment of the substance; all we require is a beam of light which that substance can be made to yield when heated to a sufficiently high temperature.
When a beam of the nebular light is transmitted through the prisms, it declares at once that the object from which that light has come is totally different from a star like the sun. Instead of the beautifully colored band, decked in all the glowing hues of the rainbow, the nebular beam is seen to be composed simply of six or seven widely separated strips. It is important to test the character of the light in these strips. Fortunately this can be done in a way that is completely satisfactory. We can produce artificial lights from known sources, and observe them through the spectroscope simultaneously with the light of the nebula.
There are in the composition of this globe some sixty or seventy different elementary substances, and under suitable conditions each one of these substances can afford a perfectly characteristic spectrum. Thus the way of making the comparison with the nebula is to try the different elements one after another, until one can be discovered which pours forth a light that behaves under the prism as does the light from the nebula. Pursuing this inquiry, Dr. Huggins found that when hydrogen gas was ignited to incandescence by the passage of electricity, it emitted light which, after passage through the prisms, came to coincidence with one of the lines in the spectrum of nebula; and the hydrogen character of two of the other lines has been since demonstrated. It was thus established that hydrogen is one of the constituents of the Great Nebula in Orion. Further confirmation of this important discovery was forthcoming when the photographs of the spectrum of the Great Nebula were subsequently obtained. On these photographs lines were present which are constituted by light of such a nature as to be wholly invisible to the eye, though perceptible on the photographic plate. It is of the greatest interest to discover that these invisible rays from the nebula are also indicative of the presence of hydrogen. Thus we obtain a beautiful confirmation of the fact that the nebula is partly composed of glowing hydrogen.
There are, however, some remaining lines, the character of which has not yet been ascertained.
It would be a little premature to assert that there must be some substance in the Great Nebula not at present known to us on the earth. This would be, no doubt, one interpretation of the facts. We must, however, admit the possibility of another explanation. It is frequently found that the lines yielded by an incandescent material vary to some extent when the physical conditions of temperature and of pressure are modified. It is, therefore, not impossible that the unknown lines in the spectrum of the Great Nebula may be due to some element known to us, but which has not yet been tested under the conditions which would make it yield the particular rays we are speaking of.
The composition of a nebula as disclosed to us by these researches is very instructive. Here we are looking at an object which seems to lie at the very limits of the visible universe—an object so remote that our attempts to fathom its distance are quite unsuccessful; yet in this inconceivably distant part of our system we find at least one ingredient which we know well on the earth. Previous to actual trial no one would have expected, I think, to find the Great Nebula largely constituted from such a familiar element as hydrogen. This gas enters into the composition of water, and is thus an element of extreme abundance on the earth. That an element so common with us here should also be abundant in these awfully distant regions of the universe is one of the most astonishing facts that modern science has revealed.
As the eye follows these ramifications of the Great Nebula, ever fading away in brightness until it dissolves in the blackness of the sky; as we look at the multitudes of bright stars which sparkle out from the depths of the great glowing gas; as we ponder on the marvelous outlines of a portion of the nebula, we are tempted to ask what the true magnitude of this object must really be. Here, again, we have to confess that science is unable to satisfy this very legitimate curiosity. The only means of learning the true length and breadth of a celestial object depends upon our first having discovered the distance from us at which the object is situated. Unhappily we are, as I have said, entirely ignorant of what this distance may be in the case of the Great Nebula in Orion. Our ordinary methods of conducting such an inquiry are hardly applicable to such an object, and its position so near the Equator introduces fresh difficulties into the problem. We shall, however, certainly not err on the side of exaggeration if we assert that the Great Nebula must be many millions of times larger than that group of bodies which we call the Solar System.