The Waterbury Democrat., 1931-01-30

are agerly awaited by the scientific
 world. It is to be hoped that the
 expectations of the astronomers to
 obtain very accurate figure of the
 distance If Eros from us and thus esta blish more correct distances within the solar system will he abundantly satisfied. A better know ledge of the moons mass should re- suit also rom the study of the grav- itational perturbatiOns of the earth moon system on the orbital motion of Eros a { different relative positions
 of moon, earth and planetoid. 1t will be of interest to present the SC results here when they are available for publication
 The fine constellation of Orion is still the prime attraction of the celestial chart. It now lies just 10 the west Of the meridian at map
 time. well over the southern horizon. Higher up, and farther westward,
 is Taurus, with it's rst-magnitude luminary, the vellowish Aldebaran, marking the eye of the Bull. The
 cluster of the Pleiades, also in TalIc- US, will be easily found still higher and furtherwest. Southeast of Orion
 is Sirius, the Great Dog Star, the brightest real star in the sky; its brightness, however is less than that 0 fthe brilliant body visible some
 what to the northward in the con-
 stellation of Gemihi, the Heavenly
 Twins. A glance at the may will show that this is the planet Juipter
 and not a true star. Sastor and PolluX, Inc two stars which give the constellation it's name. are north anG east of Jupiter.
 Sirius.
 Sirius IS hydrogen star: in it's spectrum the predominating features
 are thest-enGth of the lines or wave lengths emitted by that element. TO
 blue white color. In actual light
 emitting power, or luminosity, Sirius
 is aqual to no less than twenty-six
 suns like ours. This is known be-
 cause we have a fairly accurate
 knowledge of Sirius distance as
 about eight an deight-tenths light years; which means that it's light
 travelling ct the rate of 186, 900 miles per second takes that long to reach us. Its mass, or the amount of mat ter which it contains is about thir- | ty-four times that of the sun. But
 large as these figures make it. it is not giant among stars by any | means, for many star which is in- significant by comparison as seen
 from the earth is, indeed, many
 times the greater. Of these both
 Betelgeuze and Rigel in Orion,
 are examples. Remarka ble as it may
 seem, Risel is about eighteen thous-
 and times as powerful radiator of | light as the sun and is exceeded
 among the first magnitude stars by
 Canopus only. which the figures tell | us is eighty thousand times as
 the sun. Canopus appears to us as
 tke second brightest star in the heavens but unfortunately is not visible from the northern latitudcs $ of the United States or from Canada because of it's high southern declin- ation. It is in the constellation Of Carina, the keel of the Argonaut's s
 ship.
 Sirius is really a double star; in a | large telescope it appears that what the eye sees as one body is actually two separate stars. They form a gravitational ssytem in which the
 units are 1,S00,000 miles apart and
 revo1ve about one another in about forty years. The larger star,
 Sirius A, is twice as big and twenty
 thousand times as bright as the
 smaller. Sirius E. But in one way
 the smaller is particularly remark able: its density is over twenty-fiye thousand times that of water. The earth's density is about five and one.-