Annual Record of Science and Industry

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Mr.Plummer has a note on the collective light distribution of the fixed stars. He finds that fully three fourths of the light of a fine night comes from stars which are individually invisible to the naked eye, and that on his hypothesis the total light of all the stars of the Durchmusterung is equal to...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Mr.Plummer has a note on the collective light distribution of the fixed stars. He finds that fully three fourths of the light of a fine night comes from stars which are individually invisible to the naked eye, and that on his hypothesis the total light of all the stars of the Durchmusterung is equal to 10.17 x Venus at maximum brilliancy, or l-f-78.6 of the mean full moon. His final conclusion is that either the Durchmusterung contains many stars (more than one third of the entire number) which, though rated as 9.5 magnitude, are sensibly below it, or else it must be assumed that at the average distance for stars of this magnitude a denser stratum actually exists, succeeded possibly by regions less fruitful beyond. NEW STABS. Schmidt's observations of the new star of 1866 (TCoronas), continued up to the present time, show that after falling from the second to the seventh magnitude in nine days, its light diminished very gradually year after year down to nearly the tenth magnitude, at which it has remained pretty constant for the last two years. But during the whole period there have been fluctuations of brightness at tolerably regular intervals of ninety-four days, though of successively decreasing extent. After the first sudden fall, there seems to have been an increase of brilliancy which brought the star above the seventh magnitude again, in October, 1866, an increase of a full magnitude; but since that time the changes have been much smaller, and are now but little more than a tenth of a magnitude. The color of the star has shown no, change from pale yellow throughout the whole course of observations. Lord Lindsay makes the important announcement that Schmidt's Nova Cygni (R. A. 21h 36m 528, Dec. ] 4116'53), which blazed forth suddenly last November, exhibiting a...