The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1918-08-10
FROM
 THE SKIES
Suggestion Growing Out of the Recent Flare
 up in Aquila.

What of the new star which bIazed out the other day in the constellation Aquilla? The astronomers are yet far from clearing up the mystery of it, and the man in the street may be pardoned for having raised questions regarding the luninary which should not be asked. Was the "nova" a "sign in the heavens" some kind of a portent or warning? The nearest approach to such an interpretation came when British experts were ask ed whether the new sun was moving this way and if there was any like lihood of it getting in to a head-on collision with the earth. These mo- ments of alarm have now passed and the star, though diminished in bril- lance from the first to fourth mag nitude, is still shining-at a safe dis tance.
 In the interim, and without any un- riddling of the puzzle, we have come to realize that the celestial visitor is new" only in a Pickwickian sense, It had been seen before; at least thirty years ago Harvard photographs of the constellation showed this par ticular star in exactly the same place which it occupies today. It was then very faint object, even for the cam era, and remained such in successive pictures until early in June last. when it took a turn for the brighter, and qualified as an astronomical sen- sation. Whether the star "exploded," :" | got tremendous jolt from a dark l sun" or simply plowed it's way through 1 a nebula, nobody knows. It is easy to trace a fire to spontaneous combus- ton when the flames arise in the next street; it is much more difficult to | decide between rival theories when your conflgration is anywhere between 6,O00,000,0 100000 and 6,000,O0O, ,OO0,- 000,000 miles away
 The distance was deceptive, to say the least, and our happy-go- lucky method of thinking that everything we can observe is happening in the now led us to suppose that we were contemporaries of the "flareup.' Light does travel at inconceivabIe speed-at the rate of 1S6,0O0 miles a secondhand we get news of events in the sun in about eight minutes But many of the stars are so beWild- eringly remote that this particular outburst must have taken place not a week nor g. month before it was seen, but hundreds, perhaps thou. sands, of years ago. In studying the constellatfons that have become sc familiar and dear to us we are study. ing not what is, but the things that once -were-the vast antiquity whict makes up so much of the bulk of OH, l universe.
 Tremendous changes, of which only
 our far-Off successors can know anything, may even now be in pro. gress in the skies. And if there bs sentiment beings far afield who scar
 our habitation with instruments i'm
 measurably superior to ours, the,
 also are antiquarians in regard to us
 In one world, according to distance
 the observer might be witnessing tn,
 battle of Waterloo, in another tn,
 founding of Rome, in a third tn,
 fall of Troy, in a fourth scene iron
 ancient Egypt and it's dynasties; deep
 CT still in space we imagine some ce lestial inquirer to whom has jus
 come the vision of earliest man a
 last on his feet and disputing witt the cave bear for a place in whicI
 to lay his head. It is an impressiv, thought that there are star system
 so remote that even the swift messep
 ger of light could not reach then
 with the story of our war until lon, after this planet had ceased from if nurture of life and had been tease, . out into the cosmic dust from wf1icl newworld's necessarily come forth . Boston Herald.