The stars are suns. To put it in another way, the sun is one of the stars, and rather a small one at that. If the sun is moving in the way I have described, may not the stars also be in motion, each on a journey of its own through the wilderness of space? To this question astronomy gives an affirmative answer. Most of the stars nearest to us are found to be in motion, some faster than the sun, some more slowly, and the same is doubtless true of all; only the century of accurate observations at our disposal does not show the motion of the distant ones. A given motion seems slower the more distant the moving body; we have to watch a steamship on the horizon some little time to see that she moves at all. Thus it is that the unsolved problem of the motion of our sun is only one branch of a yet more stupendous one: What mean the motions of the stars—how did they begin, and how, if ever, will they end? So far as we can yet see, each star is going straight ahead on its own journey, without regard to its neighbors, if other stars can be so called. Is each describing some vast orbit which, though looking like a straight line during the short period of our observation, will really be seen to curve after ten thousand or a hundred thousand years, or will it go straight on forever? If the laws of motion are true for all space and all time, as we are forced to believe, then each moving star will go on in an unbending line forever unless hindered by the attraction of other stars. If they go on thus, they must, after countless years, scatter in all directions, so that the inhabitants of each shall see only a black, starless sky.
Mathematical science can throw only a few glimmers of light on the questions thus suggested. From what little we know of the masses, distances, and numbers of the stars we see a possibility that the more slow-moving ones may, in long ages, be stopped in their onward courses or brought into orbits of some sort by the attraction of their millions of fellows. But it is hard to admit even this possibility in the case of the swift-moving ones. Attraction, varying as the inverse square of the distance, diminishes so rapidly as the distance increases that, at the distances which separate the stars, it is small indeed. We could not, with the most delicate balance that science has yet invented, even show the attraction of the greatest known star. So far as we know, the two swiftest-moving stars are, first, Arcturus, and, second, one known in astronomy as 1830 Groombridge, the latter so called because it was first observed by the astronomer Groombridge, and is numbered 1830 in his catalogue of stars. If our determinations of the distances of these bodies are to be relied on, the velocity of their motion cannot be much less than two hundred miles a second. They would make the circuit of the earth every two or three minutes. A body massive enough to control this motion would throw a large part of the universe into disorder. Thus the problem where these stars came from and where they are going is for us insoluble, and is all the more so from the fact that the swiftly moving stars are moving in different directions and seem to have no connection with each other or with any known star.
It must not be supposed that these enormous velocities seem so to us. Not one of them, even the greatest, would be visible to the naked eye until after years of watching. On our finger-ring scale, 1830 Groombridge would be some ten miles and Arcturus thirty or forty miles away. Either of them would be moving only two or three feet in a year. To the oldest Assyrian priests Lyra looked much as it does to us to-day. Among the bright and well-known stars Arcturus has the most rapid apparent motion, yet Job himself would not to-day see that its position had changed, unless he had noted it with more exactness than any astronomer of his time.
Another unsolved problem among the greatest which present themselves to the astronomer is that of the size of the universe of stars. We know that several thousand of these bodies are visible to the naked eye; moderate telescopes show us millions; our giant telescopes of the present time, when used as cameras to photograph the heavens, show a number past count, perhaps one hundred millions. Are all these stars only those few which happen to be near us in a universe extending out without end, or do they form a collection of stars outside of which is empty infinite space? In other words, has the universe a boundary? Taken in its widest scope this question must always remain unanswered by us mortals because, even if we should discover a boundary within which all the stars and clusters we ever can know are contained, and outside of which is empty space, still we could never prove that this space is empty out to an infinite distance. Far outside of what we call the universe might still exist other universes which we can never see.
It is a great encouragement to the astronomer that, although he cannot yet set any exact boundary to this universe of ours, he is gathering faint indications that it has a boundary, which his successors not many generations hence may locate so that the astronomer shall include creation itself within his mental grasp. It can be shown mathematically that an infinitely extended system of stars would fill the heavens with a blaze of light like that of the noonday sun. As no such effect is produced, it may be concluded that the universe has a boundary. But this does not enable us to locate the boundary, nor to say how many stars may lie outside the farthest stretches of telescopic vision. Yet by patient research we are slowly throwing light on these points and reaching inferences which, not many years ago, would have seemed forever beyond our powers.
Every one now knows that the Milky Way, that girdle of light which spans the evening sky, is formed of clouds of stars too minute to be seen by the unaided vision. It seems to form the base on which the universe is built and to bind all the stars into a system. It comprises by far the larger number of stars that the telescope has shown to exist. Those we see with the naked eye are almost equally scattered over the sky. But the number which the telescope shows us become more and more condensed in the Milky Way as telescope power is increased. The number of new stars brought out with our greatest power is vastly greater in the Milky Way than in the rest of the sky, so that the former contains a great majority of the stars. What is yet more curious, spectroscopic research has shown that a particular kind of stars, those formed of heated gas, are yet more condensed in the central circle of this band; if they were visible to the naked eye, we should see them encircling the heavens as a narrow girdle forming perhaps the base of our whole system of stars. This arrangement of the gaseous or vaporous stars is one of the most singular facts that modern research has brought to light. It seems to show that these particular stars form a system of their own; but how such a thing can be we are still unable to see.
The question of the form and extent of the Milky Way thus becomes the central one of stellar astronomy. Sir William Herschel began by trying to sound its depths; at one time he thought he had succeeded; but before he died he saw that they were unfathomable with his most powerful telescopes. Even today he would be a bold astronomer who would profess to say with certainty whether the smallest stars we can photograph are at the boundary of the system. Before we decide this point we must have some idea of the form and distance of the cloudlike masses of stars which form our great celestial girdle. A most curious fact is that our solar system seems to be in the centre of this galactic universe, because the Milky Way divides the heavens into two equal parts, and seems equally broad at all points. Were we looking at such a girdle as this from one side or the other, this appearance would not be presented. But let us not be too bold. Perhaps we are the victims of some fallacy, as Ptolemy was when he proved, by what looked like sound reasoning, based on undeniable facts, that this earth of ours stood at rest in the centre of the heavens!
A related problem, and one which may be of supreme importance to the future of our race, is, What is the source of the heat radiated by the sun and stars? We know that life on the earth is dependent on the heat which the sun sends it. If we were deprived of this heat we should in a few days be enveloped in a frost which would destroy nearly all vegetation, and in a few months neither man nor animal would be alive, unless crouching over fires soon to expire for want of fuel. We also know that, at a time which is geologically recent, the whole of New England was covered with a sheet of ice, hundreds or even thousands of feet thick, above which no mountain but Washington raised its head. It is quite possible that a small diminution in the supply of heat sent us by the sun would gradually reproduce the great glacier, and once more make the Eastern States like the pole. But the fact is that observations of temperature in various countries for the last two or three hundred years do not show any change in climate which can be attributed to a variation in the amount of heat received from the sun.
The acceptance of this theory of the heat of those heavenly bodies which shine by their own light—sun, stars, and nebulae—still leaves open a problem that looks insoluble with our present knowledge. What becomes of the great flood of heat and light which the sun and stars radiate into empty space with a velocity of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second? Only a very small fraction of it can be received by the planets or by other stars, because these are mere points compared with their distance from us. Taking the teaching of our science just as it stands, we should say that all this heat continues to move on through infinite space forever. In a few thousand years it reaches the probable confines of our great universe. But we know of no reason why it should stop here. During the hundreds of millions of years since all our stars began to shine, has the first ray of light and heat kept on through space at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, and will it continue to go on for ages to come? If so, think of its distance now, and think of its still going on, to be forever wasted! Rather say that the problem, What becomes of it? is as yet unsolved.
Thus far I have described the greatest of problems; those which we may suppose to concern the inhabitants of millions of worlds revolving round the stars as much as they concern us. Let us now come down from the starry heights to this little colony where we live, the solar system. Here we have the great advantage of being better able to see what is going on, owing to the comparative nearness of the planets. When we learn that these bodies are like our earth in form, size, and motions, the first question we ask is, Could we fly from planet to planet and light on the surface of each, what sort of scenery would meet our eyes? Mountain, forest, and field, a dreary waste, or a seething caldron larger than our earth? If solid land there is, would we find on it the homes of intelligent beings, the lairs of wild beasts, or no living thing at all? Could we breathe the air, would we choke for breath or be poisoned by the fumes of some noxious gas?