Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1885-09-29
Is TIA New Star.


Professional and amateur scientists all
over this mundane sphere are in futter
OF excitement at present over the appear
ance of new star or sun of the eighth
magnitude in the nebula of Andromeda.
A photograph of that nebula taken on
August 10 showed no signs of change in
that feecy brightness, but on August 10
new star shone there with great BRILL
ancy. Now the great question is whether
it really is new star that has come to
twinkle, twinkle all the night" hence
forth and forever, or merely an old, ex-
tinguished one, that has in some way
contrived to blaze up again-a sort Of
ghost in Hamlet revisiting the glimpses
of the moon for a brief but brilliant
period.
If it is new star it knocks all the pet
theories of the astronomers regarding
world building out in one round. Laplace
taught and all subsequent astronomers
have accepted the doctrine, that the con-
solidation of the gases and star dust of
which all the heavenly bodies are sup
posed to be formed, into the shining
spheres which stud the sky by night,
was slow and gradual process requiring
countless ages for completion. But if
this new luminary is genuine star and
was formed almost instantaneously La
places theory must go.
But when will the real date of its birth
be settled? Andromeda is almost an
unreasonable distance from this globe
of ours, and light travels at certain rate
of speed. How long period may have
elapsed from the moment when the first
beam of light from the baby star started
earthward till it fell upon the retina of it's
first human discoverer?
The New York Herald, which makes
considerable pretensions to astronomical
wisdom, seems to think that the spark
ling stranger is an old sun blazing up for
time from its dying embers. It says:
"The new star, the birth of which
was cabled to the Herald yesterday from
Europe, is possibly one of the noted va
rabies, so called because their brilliancy
undergoes such remarkable changes that
at one time they are almost invisible and
at another blaze up into stars of the first
magnitude. The nebula in Andromeda
(out of which the new star is reported to
have been born), though visible to the
naked eye, eXcites no suspicion of its con-
sisting of stars, even when seen with an
ordinary reflector, but examined with
powerful defining instruments the evil
dence of its resolvability into stellar bod
les has long been regarded as decisive.
One of the stars in Androrneda, as is well
known, varies from the sixth to the thir-
teenth magnitude in nearly regular pc
Rod of four hundred and five days.
Another most extraordinary, variable
star is in Argus, of the Southern hemi-
sphere. When seen by Haley in 1877,
at st. Helena, it was of the fourth magni-
tude, but was found by Lacaille, in 1751,
twice as bright, and in 1928 reached the
first magnitude. Herschel afterward OBJ
serving it at Cape of Good Hope, wrote =
Tt was on December 16, 1887, that, re-
Stunning the photometrical comparisons,
my establishment was excited by the APP
pearance of a new candidate for distinct
ion among the very brightest stars of the
first magnitude in part of the heavens
with which being perfectly familiar, I
was certain that no such brilliant object
had before been SEEM The same star
blazed up into glory brighter than ever
and second only to that of Sirius in 1912,
but it is now lost to the unaided vision.
"The history of the new wonder in
Andromeda is probably similar to that
of its congener of Argus. We may be
prepared, therefore, to hear of its flash
ing into most astonishing splendor, per-
haps only to fade finally into obscurity,
or possibly to be numbered among the
missing stars which have been appar-
emily lost in the abysses of stellar space.
1t is most probably an old sun, from
whose surface there has occurred sud-
den and extraordinary eruption of glow
ing hydrogen, which, by its own light
and by its heating up the whole star, has
caused the hitherto dim orb to blaze forth
in unwonted brilliancy through the thin
veil that formerly surrounded it."