By A.M. CLERKE.
Science needed two thousand years to disentangle the earth's orbital movement from the revolutions of the other planets, and the incomparably more arduous problem of distinguishing the solar share in the confused multitude of stellar displacements first presented itself as possibly tractable a little more than a century ago. In the lack for it as yet of a definite solution there is, then, no ground for surprise, but much for satisfaction in the large measure of success attending the strenuous attacks of which it has so often been made the object.
Approximately correct knowledge as to the direction and velocity of the sun's translation is indispensable to a profitable study of sidereal construction; but apart from some acquaintance with the nature of sidereal construction, it is difficult, if not impossible, of attainment. One, in fact, presupposes the other. To separate a common element of motion from the heterogeneous shiftings upon the sphere of three or four thousand stars is a task practicable only under certain conditions. To begin with, the proper motions investigated must be established with general exactitude. The errors inevitably affecting them must be such as pretty nearly, in the total upshot, to neutralize one another. For should they run mainly in one direction, the result will be falsified in a degree enormously disproportionate to their magnitude. The adoption, for instance, of system of declinations as much as 1" of arc astray might displace to the extent of 10° north or south the point fixed upon as the apex of the sun's way (see L. Boss Astr. Jour., No. 213). Risks on this score, however, will become less formidable with the further advance of practical astronomy along a track definable as an asymptote of ideal perfection.
Besides this obstacle to be overcome, there is another which it will soon be possible to evade. Hitherto, inquiries into the solar movement have been hampered by the necessity for preliminary assumptions of some kind as to the relative distances of classes of stars. But all such assumptions, especially when applied to selected lists, are highly insecure; and any fabric reared upon them must be considered to stand upon treacherous ground. The spectrographic method, however, here fortunately comes into play. "Proper motions" are only angular velocities. They tell nothing as to the value of the perspective element they may be supposed to include, or as to the real rate of going of the bodies they are attributed to, until the size of the sphere upon which they are measured has been otherwise ascertained. But the displacement of lines in stellar spectra give directly the actual velocities relative to the earth of the observed stars. The question of their distances is, therefore, at once eliminated. Now the radial component of stellar motion is mixed up, precisely in the same way as the tangential component, with the solar movement; and since complete knowledge of it, in a sufficient number of cases, is rapidly becoming accessible, while knowledge of tangential velocity must for a long time remain partial or uncertain, the advantage of replacing the discussion of proper motions by that of motions in line of sight is obvious and immediate. And the admirable work carried on at Potsdam during the last three years will soon afford the means of doing so in the first, if only a preliminary investigation of the solar translation based upon measurements of photographed stellar spectra.
The difficulties, then, caused either by inaccuracies in star catalogues or by ignorance of star distances may be overcome; but there is a third, impossible at present to be surmounted, and not without misgiving to be passed by. All inquiries upon the subject of the advance of our system through space start with an hypothesis most unlikely to be true. The method uniformly adopted in them—and no other is available—is to treat the inherent motions of the stars (their so-called motus peculiares) as pursued indifferently in all directions. The steady drift extricable from them by rules founded upon the science of probabilities is presumed to be solar motion visually transferred to them in proportions varying with their remoteness in space, and their situations on the sphere. If this presumption be in any degree baseless, the result of the inquiry is pro tanto falsified. Unless the deviations from the parallactic line of the stellar motions balance one another on the whole, their discussion may easily be as fruitless as that of observations tainted with systematic errors. It is scarcely, however, doubtful that law, and not chance, governs the sidereal revolutions. The point open to question is whether the workings of law may not be so exceedingly intricate as to produce a grand sum total of results which, from the geometrical side, may justifiably be regarded as casual.
The search for evidence of a general plan in the wanderings of the stars over the face of the sky has so far proved fruitless. Local concert can be traced, but no widely diffused preference for one direction over any other makes itself definitely felt. Some regard, nevertheless, must be paid by them to the plane of the Milky Way; since it is altogether incredible that the actual construction of the heavens is without dependence upon the method of their revolutions.
The apparent anomaly vanishes upon the consideration of the profundities of space and time in which the fundamental design of the sidereal universe lies buried. Its composition out of an indefinite number of partial systems is more than probable; but the inconceivable leisureliness with which their mutual relations develop renders the harmony of those relations inappreciable by short-lived terrestrial denizens. "Proper motions," if this be so, are of a subordinate kind; they are indexes simply to the mechanism of particular aggregations, and have no definable connection with the mechanism of the whole. No considerable error may then be involved in treating them, for purposes of calculation, as indifferently directed, and the elicited solar movement may genuinely represent the displacement of our system relative to its more immediate stellar environment. This is perhaps the utmost to be hoped for until sidereal astronomy has reached another stadium of progress.
Unless, indeed, effect should be given to Clerk Maxwell's suggestion for deriving the absolute longitude of the solar apex from observations of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites (Proc. Roy. Soc., vol. xxx., p. 109). But this is far from likely. In the first place, the revolutions of the Jovian system cannot be predicted with anything like the required accuracy. In the second place, there is no certainty that the postulated phenomena have any real existence. If, however, it be safe to assume that the solar system, cutting its way through space, virtually raises an ethereal counter-current, and if it be further granted that light travels less with than against such a current, then indeed it becomes speculatively possible, through slight alternate accelerations and retardations of eclipses taking place respectively ahead of and in the wake of the sun, to determine his absolute path in space as projected upon the ecliptic. That is to say, the longitude of the apex could be deduced together with the resolved part of the solar velocity; the latitude of the apex, as well as the component of velocity perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, remaining, however, unknown.
The beaten track, meanwhile, has conducted two recent inquirers to results of some interest. The chief aim of each was the detection of systematic peculiarities in the motions of stellar assemblages after the subtraction from them of their common perspective element. By varying the materials and method of analysis, Prof. Lewis Boss, Director of the Albany Observatory, hopes that corresponding variations in the upshot may betray a significant character. Thus, if stars selected on different principles give notably and consistently different results, the cause of the difference may with some show of reason be supposed to reside in specialties of movement appertaining to the several groups. Prof. Boss broke ground in this direction by investigating 284 proper motions, few of which had been similarly employed before (Astr. Jour., No. 213). They were all taken from an equatorial zone 4° 20' in breadth, with a mean declination of +3°, observed at Albany for the catalogue of the Astronomische Gesellschaft, and furnished data accordingly for a virtually independent research of a somewhat distinctive kind. It was carried out to three separate conclusions. Setting aside five stars with secular movements ranging above 100", Prof. Boss divided the 279 left available into two sets—one of 185 stars brighter, the other of 144 stars fainter than the eighth magnitude. The first collection gave for the goal of solar translation a point about 4° north of α Lyræ, in R.A. 280°, Decl. +43°; the second, one some thirty-seven minutes of time to the west of δ Cygni, in R.A. 286°, Decl. +45°. For a third and final solution, twenty-six stars moving 40"-100" were rejected, and the remaining 253 classed in a single series. The upshot of their discussion was to shift the apex of movement to R.A. 289°, Decl. +51°. So far as the difference from the previous pair of results is capable of interpretation, it would seem to imply a predominant set toward the northeast of the twenty-six swifter motions subsequently dismissed as prejudicial, but in truth the data employed were not accurate enough to warrant so definite an inference. The Albany proper motions, as Prof. Boss was careful to explain, depend for the most part upon the right ascensions of Bessel's and Lalande's zones, and are hence subject to large errors. Their study must be regarded as suggestive rather than decisive.
A better quality and a larger quantity of material was disposed of by the latest and perhaps the most laborious investigator of this intricate problem. M. Oscar Stumpe, of Bonn (Astr. Nach., Nos. 2,999, 3,000), took his stars, to the number of 1,054, from various quarters, if chiefly from Auwers' and Argelander's lists, critically testing, however, the movement attributed to each of not less than 16" a century. This he fixed as the limit of secure determination, unless for stars observed with exceptional constancy and care. His discussion of them is instructive in more ways than one. Adopting, the additional computative burden imposed by it notwithstanding, Schonfeld's modification of Airy's formulæ, he introduced into his equations a fifth unknown quantity expressive of a possible stellar drift in galactic longitude. A negative result was obtained. No symptom came to light of "rotation" in the plane of the Milky Way.