The double star 61 Cygni, in
fact, is displaced very nearly as much in one year as Alcyone with its
train in one hundred. Nor is there much probability that this slow
secular shifting is other than apparent; since it pretty accurately
reverses the course of the sun's translation through space, it may be
presumed that the _backward_ current of movement in which the Pleiades
seem to float is purely an effect of our own _onward_ traveling.
Now the curious fact emerges from Dr. Elkin's inquiries that six of
Bessel's stars are exempt from the general drift of the group. They
are being progressively left behind. The inference is obvious that
they do not in reality belong to, but are merely accidentally
projected upon, it; or, rather, that it is projected upon them; for
their apparent immobility (which, in two of the six, may be called
absolute) shows them with tolerable certainty to be indefinitely more
remote--so remote that the path, moderately estimated at
21,000,000,000 miles in length, traversed by the solar system during
the forty-five years elapsed since the Konigsberg measures dwindles
into visual insensibility when beheld from them. The brightest of
these six far-off stars is just above the eighth (7.9) magnitude; the
others range from 8.
Pages:
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167