A MYSTERY OF THE SKY.

Lake County Press, Issue 1066, 28 May 1903, Page 3

A MYSTERY OF THE SKY.

One of the unsolved problems of j astronomy, which has pushed wide j the doors leading to new marvels of ! science, is the behaviour of that much-talked-of phenomenon, Nova Persci, the flaming star that sprang apparently out of nothing, and gave birth to, or was turned into, a nebula. It seems impossible to exaggerate, in speaking of the stupendous character of the accident, the catastrophe, or whatever the tremendous event may have been, that put Nova Persei in the sky. Certain lines of reasoning based on the phenomena observed, have led to the conclusion that if a thousand suns like ours could be thrown into one scale of a balance and Nova Persei into the opposite scale, the latter would drop like lead, and the thousand stars would kick the beam ! That vast, inconceivable mass hung unseen, unfclt, unknown, in the rayless void of space, capable of mastering our mighty sun, if he had fallen within our sphere of action as a giant may grasp a child, and yet giving no indication of its existence until suddenly it blazed forth with the angry hue of fii'e, and with n brilliance that paled all the neighbouring stars. Then, forth from the glowing centre, in undulant waves, rolled immense spirals of nebulous light, until space, for thousands of millions of miles around, was glowing as if lighted with the reflections of a conflagration too gigantic for belief. And it is glowing still. The mystery is still unsolved, but the solution that the appearances suggest is that the colossal, invisible mass that lurked there in unlighted space has burst, through sudden heat, from a solid, inert, non-luminous body into a whirling cloud of atoms. Jt is the reverse of the creation of a world. It is a world uncreated, dissipated, annihilated in a nebula ! But not such a world as ours. The infinitely great admits no comparison with the infinitely little.— " New York Journal."