After unsuccessful attempts extending over several centuries the distance of one of the nearest stars, the faint 61 Cygni, as it is catalogued, was finally determined by the astronomer Bessel in the year 1838.
This star is about ten light-years distant from the earth, which places it about six hundred and thirty thousand times farther away from us than the sun; that is, we would have to travel six hundred and thirty thousand times the distance from the earth to the sun to reach this very close stellar neighbor, 61 Cygni. The nearest of all the stars, Alpha Centauri, is over two hundred and seventy thousand times the distance from the earth to the sun. It is, therefore, little wonder that the early astronomers believed that the stars were fixed in space since even the nearest is so far away that, viewed from opposite points in the earth's orbit, its apparent change in position due to our actual change in position of 186,000,000 miles, amounts to only one and a half seconds of arc. Two stars separated by one hundred and sixty times this angular distance might possibly be glimpsed as two distinct stars by a person with good eyesight, though to most of us they would appear as one star. Upon the measurement of such minute angles depended a knowledge of the distances of the nearest stars.
It is to Sir William Herschel that we owe the discovery, more than a hundred years ago, of the motion of the sun through the universe. From the consideration of a long series of observations of the positions of the stars this famous astronomer discovered that the stars in the direction of the constellation Hercules were separated by much greater angular distances than the stars diametrically opposite in the heavens. In other words, the stars were spreading apart in one portion of the heavens and crowding together in the opposite direction and he rightly interpreted this to mean that the sun was moving in the direction of the constellation of Hercules. It was not until the spectroscope was applied to the study of the heavens in the latter part of the nineteenth century that the amount of this motion of the sun was found to be about twelve and a half miles per second, or four times the distance from the earth to the sun in a year.
It is to Sir William Herschel that we owe also the discovery of binary systems of stars in which two stars swing around a point between them called their center of gravity.
Spiral Nebula in Canes Venatici
Taken with 60-inch Reflector of the Mt. Wilson Observatory
Our first conception of the immensity and grandeur of the universe dates from the time of the older Herschel only a century or so ago. The mysterious nebulæ and star clusters were then discovered, the wonders of the Milky Way were explored, and a new planet and satellites in our own solar system were discovered. It was found that the sun and the stars as well as the planets were in motion. Neither sun nor earth could be regarded any longer as a fixed point in the universe.
With the application of the spectroscope to the study of the heavens toward the end of the nineteenth century the key to a treasure-house of knowledge was placed in the hands of the astronomers of modern times and as a result we are now learning more, in a few decades, about the wonders and mysteries of the heavens than was granted to man to learn in centuries of earlier endeavor. Yet it is the feeling of the astronomer of today that he is only standing on the threshold of knowledge and that the greatest of all discoveries, that of the nature of matter and of time and space is yet to be made.