The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1885-09-19 00:00:00

THE NEW STAR,

A strange notion has been for some time abroad.
Many have been expecting a re-appearance of the
Star of Bethlehem. A certain periodicity seemed to
have been recognised in the shining forth of a brilliant
star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Three hundred
years ago a new star was seen there, which was idea-
tified---somewhat precariously—with stars seen in
the 13th .and 10th centuries, and so over a gap of
more than nine hundred years with the Star of
Bethlehem. If these premisses were sound, a star
might be expected to appear about this time in the
same part of the heavens; and in America this star
has been earnestly looked for during several years
past, especially by believers in the Great Pyramid
prophecies. But while science has little to say about
this expectation, the observed facts bearing on it being
few and doubtful, science will probably have a great
deal to say about a new star which has shone forth
where certainly no new star was expected, viz., in the
very heart of a star cloud, to which the astronomers
of the seventeenth century gave the loud-sounding
title "the transcendently beautiful queen of the
nebulm." No nebula, except perhaps the great fish-
mouth nebula in Orion, has been better studied
since the telescope was first directed to the star
depths. One of five cloudy stars known to the
ancients, this object had been scrutinised from the
days of Simon Mayer (or Marius) until the present
day, with telescopes ever growing in power and per-
fection. Details of structure had been found in the
long diamond-shaped star-cloud with its nucleus,
compared by Marius to the light of a candle shining
through horn. Two dark tracks running along its
length were detected a quarter of a century ago by
Professor G. P. Bond in America. But of stars
observers found none, even when they used the most
powerful telescopes. With every appearance of re-
solvability, the nebula never had been resolved. Yet it
had been proved to be stellar in constitution. for Dr.
Huggins, analysing it with the spectroscope, found its
light to be of the same quality as that of our own sun
and of his fellow suns—the stars. There was no evi-
dence whatever of gaseity ; that is to say, there was
no trace of light coming from self -luminous gaseous
matter, for there was abundant evidence of absorp-
tion by vapours surrounding the stellar material of the
nebula. The appearance of a new star in the heart
of this stellar nebula—this true star cloud—was about
the last thing which astronomers would have expected.
There had been cases in which stars had shone out
with great accession of splendour from the midst of
gaseous nebulm. This had happened in the
case of the marvellous patch of milky light in
the keel of the great star-ship Argo; for
though the star Eta Ares was no new one in
18 tO, yet its surpassing brightness at that time was
altogether new. Lacaille had classed it as of the
fourth magnitude only—no brightor than the smaller
of the two stars which mark the lower ,back rail of
Cassiopeia's chair. Sir John Herschel, while at the
Cape, had seen it grow into a second magnitude star.
But after he had returned to England he re-
ceived news (in 1810) that Eta Ares was shin-
ing more brightly that any first magnitude star
in the heavens except the two chief brilliants,
Sirius and Canopus. And npw Eta Argils is
barely visible to the naked eye. Another case,
still more remarkable perhaps, was that of the
star which appeared suddenly in the constella-
tion Cygnus. In this case no nebula had been
noticed where the new star appeared; but doubtless
there had been one there; at any rate there has been
one there ever since the now star died out, some six
years since; and this nebula presents all the charac-
teristics of the familiar order of planetary nebulte,
objects so called because they look like nebulous
ghosts of dead planets. They are all gaseous; so
that the new star in Cygnus may be regarded as a
case of a star making its appearance in the midst of
of a gaseous nebula. But as yet no new star had
ever appeared in a stella nebula.
The discovery is fatal to the doctrine that the star
clouds are external star-systems like our own galaxy.
If we try to imagine an observer so far away from
our stellar system that it would appear to him no
larger than the queen of the nebulm appears to us,
a star which, blazing out in the midst of our
galaxy, should appear to him as an eighth
magnitude star appears to us, would have to be
of such surpassing brilliancy that it would make
all the suns throughcut the length and breadth
and depth of the galaxy pale their ineffectual
fires before its amazing lustre. If the new star, on
the other hand; is but an ordinary star for real size
and present splendour, than the great nebula in An-
dromeda lies well within the limits of our galazy—as
one or two students of astronomy in the present day
had asserted on other grounds that such decisive evi-
dence as has been now obtained. The study of the
new star with the spectroscope cannot but prove most
interesting and in3tructive.

THE CHOLERA EPIDEMIC.
DEATH OF AN ARCHBISHOP.
(From a Correspondent.)
PARIS, Sunday.
Mgr. roreade, Archbishop of Aix, aged 69, died a
cholera yesterday in his diocese. It is alleged that
he caught the disease by visiting the sick in the hos-
pitals. He is nearly the last victim, for all accounts
from Marseilles and Toulon agree that the epidemic
is rapidly disappearing. Mgr. Forcade, who was a
man of considerable talent, attracted the notioe of
Pope Gregory when only 30 years of age, and was
made Bishop of Samos in partibus, and vicar
apostolic of Japan. M. Thiers in 1873 promoted
him from the bishopric of Nevers to the arch-
bishopric of Aix. He had a holy hatred of the Re-
public and for meddling in politics. In 1876 he
incurred that perfectly innocuous censure of the
State which the clergy laugh at, called L'Appel comma
d'Abus.