The Children's Book of Stars

G.E. Mitton

The Children's Book of Stars

PREFACE

It was the intention of the late Agnes Clerke to write the preface to this 'Children's Book of Stars.' Miss Clerke took a warm and sympathetic interest in the authoress and her work, but her lamented death occurred before this kindly intention could be fulfilled.

I cannot pretend to write adequately as her substitute, but I could not resist the appeal made to me by the author, in the name and for the sake of her dear friend and mine, to write a few words of introduction.

I am in no way responsible either for the plan or for any portion of this work, but I can commend it as a book, written in a simple and pleasant style, calculated to awaken the interest of intelligent children, and to enable parents otherwise ignorant or astronomy to answer many of those puzzling questions which such children often put.

DAVID GILL.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This little work is the outcome of many suggestions on the part of friends who were anxious to teach their small children something of the marvels of the heavens, but found it exceedingly difficult to get hold of a book wherein the intense fascination of the subject was not lost in conventional phraseology – a book in which the stupendous facts were stated in language simple enough to be read aloud to a child without paraphrase.

Whatever merit there may be in the present work is due entirely to my friend Agnes Clerke, the well-known writer on astronomy; the faults are all my own. She gave me the impetus to begin by her warm encouragement, and she helped me to continue by hearing every chapter read as it was written, and by discussing its successor and making suggestions for it. Thus she heard the whole book in MS. A week after the last chapter had been read to her I started on a journey lasting many months, and while I was in the Far East the news reached me of her death, by which the world is the poorer. For her sake, as he has stated, her friend Sir David Gill, K.C.B., kindly undertook to supply the missing preface.

G. E. MITTON.

CHAPTER I

THE EARTH

It is a curious fact that when we are used to things, we often do not notice them, and things which we do every day cease to attract our attention. We find an instance of this in the curious change that comes over objects the further they are removed from us. They grow smaller and smaller, so that at a distance a grown-up person looks no larger than a doll; and a short stick planted in the ground only a few feet away appears as long as a much longer one at ten times the distance. This process is going on all round us every minute: houses, trees, buildings, animals, all seem larger or smaller in proportion to their distance from us. Sometimes I have seen a row of raindrops hanging on a bar by the window. When the sun catches one of them, it shines so brilliantly that it is as dazzling as a star; but my sense tells me it is a raindrop, and not a star at all. It is only because it is so near it seems as bright and important as a mighty star very, very far away.

We are so much accustomed to this fact that we get into a habit of judging the distance of things by their size. If we see two lights shining on a dark night, and one is much larger than the other, we think that the bright one must be nearer to us; yet it need not necessarily be so, for the two lights might possibly be at the same distance from us, and one be large and the other small. There is no way in which we can tell the truth by just looking at them. Now, if we go out on any fine moonlight night and look up at the sky, we shall see one object there apparently much larger than any other, and that is the moon, so the question that occurs to us at once is, Is the moon really very much larger than any of the stars, or does it only seem so because it is very much nearer to us? As a matter of fact, the moon is one of the smallest objects in view, only, as it is our nearest neighbour, it appears very conspicuous. Having learned this, we shall probably look about to see what else there is to attract attention, and we may notice one star shining very brilliantly, almost like a little lamp, rather low down in the sky, in that part of it where the sun has lately set. It is so beautifully bright that it makes all the others look insignificant in comparison, yet it is not really large compared with the others, only, as it comes nearer to us than anything else in the sky except the moon, it looks larger than it has any right to do in comparison with the others.

After this we might jump to the conclusion that all the bright large stars are really small and near to us, and all the faintly shining ones large and far away. But that would not be true at all, for some bright ones are very far away and some faint ones comparatively near, so that all we can do is to learn about them from the people who have studied them and found out about them, and then we shall know of our own knowledge which of them seem bright only because they are nearer than the others, and which are really very, very brilliant, and so still shine brightly, though set in space at an almost infinite distance from us.

The sun, as we all know, appears to cross the sky every day; he gets up in the east and drops down in the west, and the moon does the same, only the moon is unlike the sun in this, that it changes its shape continually. We see a crescent moon growing every night larger and larger, until it becomes full and fat and round, and then it grows thinner and thinner, until it dies away; and after a little while it begins again, and goes through all the same changes once more. I will tell you why this is so further on, when we have a chapter all about the moon.

If you watch the stars quietly for at least five minutes, you will see that they too are moving steadily on in the same way as the sun and moon. Watch one bright star coming out from behind a chimney-pot, and after about five minutes you will see that it has changed its place. Yet this is not true of all, for if we watch carefully we shall find that some, fairly high up in the sky, do not appear to move at all. The few which are moving so slowly that they seem to us to stand still are at a part of the sky close to the Pole Star, so called because it is always above the North Pole of the earth. I will explain to you how to find it in the sky for yourselves later on, but now you can ask anyone to point it out. Watch it. It appears to be fixed in one place, while the other stars are swinging round it in circles. In fact, it is as if we on the earth were inside a great hollow globe or ball, which continually turned round, with the Pole Star near the top of the globe; and you know that if you put your finger on the spot at the top of a spinning globe or ball, you can hold it there while all the rest of the ball runs round. Now, if you had to explain things to yourself, you would naturally think: 'Here is the great solid earth standing still, and the sun and moon go round it; the stars are all turning round it too, just as if they were fixed on to the inside of a hollow globe; we on the earth are in the middle looking up at them; and this great globe is slowly wheeling round us night by night.'

In the childhood of the world men believed that this was really true – that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sun and moon and all the hosts of heaven were there solely to light and benefit us; but as the world grew wiser the wonders of creation were fathomed little by little. Some men devoted their whole lives to watching the heavens, and the real state of things was gradually revealed to them. The first great discovery was that of the daily movement of the earth, its rotation on its own axis, which makes it appear as if all these shining things went round it. It is indeed a very difficult matter to judge which of two objects is moving unless we can compare them both with something outside. You must have noticed this when you are sitting in a train at a station, and there is another train on the other side of yours. For if one of the trains moves gently, either yours or the other, you cannot tell which one it is unless you look at the station platform; and if your position remains the same in regard to that, you know that your train is still standing, while the other one beside it has begun to move. And I am quite sure that there is no one of us who has not, at one time or another, stood on a bridge and watched the water running away underneath until we felt quite dizzy, and it seemed as if the water were standing still and the bridge, with ourselves on it, was flying swiftly away backwards. It is only when we turn to the banks and find them standing still, that we realize the bridge is not moving, and that it is the running water that makes it seem to do so. These everyday instances show us how difficult it is to judge whether we are moving or an outside object unless we have something else to compare with it. And the marvellous truth is that, instead of the sun and moon and stars rolling round the earth, it is the earth that is spinning round day by day, while the sun and the stars are comparatively still; and, though the moon does move, yet when we see her get up in the east and go down in the west that is due to our own movement and not to hers.

The earth turns completely round once in a day and night. If you take an orange and stick a knitting-needle through it, and hold it so that the needle is not quite straight up but a little slanting, and then twirl it round, you will get quite a good idea of the earth, though of course there is no great pole like a gigantic needle stuck through it, that is only to make it easy for you to hold it by. In spinning the orange you are turning it as the earth turns day by day, or, as astronomers express it, as it rotates on its axis.

There is a story of a cruel Eastern King who told a prisoner that he must die if he did not answer three questions correctly, and the questions were very difficult; this is one of them:

'How long would it take a man to go round the earth if he never stopped to eat or drink on the way?'

And the prisoner answered promptly: 'If he rose with the sun and kept pace with it all day, and never stopped for a moment to eat or drink, he would take just twenty-four hours, Your Royal Highness.' For in those days it was supposed that the sun went round the earth.

Everyone is so remarkably clever nowadays that I am sure there will be someone clever enough to object that, if what I have said is true, there would be a great draught, for the air would be rushing past us. But, as a matter of fact, the air goes with us too. If you are inside a railway carriage with the windows shut you do not feel the rush of air, because the air in the carriage travels with you; and it is the same thing on the earth. The air which surrounds the earth clings to it and goes round with it, so there is no continuous breeze from this cause.

But the spinning round on its own axis is not the earth's only movement, for all the time it is also moving on round the sun, and once in a whole year it completes its journey and comes back to the place from whence it started. Thus the turning round like a top or rotating on its axis makes the day and night, and the going in a great ring or revolving round the sun makes the years.

Our time is divided into other sections besides days and years. We have, for instance, weeks and months. The weeks have nothing to do with the earth's movements; they are only made by man to break up the months; but the months are really decided by something over which we have no control. They are due to the moon, and, as I have said already, the moon must have a chapter to herself, so we won't say any more about the months here.

If any friend of ours goes to India or New Zealand or America, we look upon him as a great traveller; yet every baby who has lived one year on the earth has travelled millions of miles without the slightest effort. Every day of our lives we are all flung through space without knowing it or thinking of it. It is as if we were all shut up in a comfortable travelling car, and were provided with so many books and pictures and companions that we never cared to look out of the windows, so that hour by hour as we were carried along over miles of space we never gave them a thought. Even the most wonderful car ever made by man rumbles and creaks and shakes, so that we cannot help knowing it is moving; but this beautiful travelling carriage of ours called the earth makes never a creak or groan as she spins in her age-long journey. It is always astonishing to me that so few people care to look out of the window as we fly along; most of them are far too much absorbed in their little petty daily concerns ever to lift their eyes from them. It is true that sometimes the blinds are down, for the sky is thickly covered with clouds, and we cannot see anything even if we want to. It is true also that we cannot see much of the scenery in the daytime, for the sun shining on the air makes a veil of blue glory, which hides the stars; but on clear nights we can see on every side numbers of stars quite as interesting and beautiful as any landscape; and yet millions of people never look up, never give a thought to the wonderful scenery through which their car is rushing.

By reason of the onward rush of the earth in space we are carried over a distance of at least eighteen miles every second. Think of it: as we draw a breath we are eighteen miles away in space from the point we were at before, and this goes on unceasingly day and night. These astonishing facts make us feel how small and feeble we are, but we can take comfort in the thought that though our bodies are insignificant, the brain of man, which has discovered these startling facts, must in itself be regarded as one of the most marvellous of all the mysteries amid which we live.

Well, we have arrived at some idea of our earth's position; we know that the earth is turning round day by day, and progressing round the sun year by year, and that all around lie the sentinel stars, scattered on a background of infinite space. If you take an older boy or girl and let him or her stand in the middle to represent the sun, then a smaller one would be the earth, and the smallest of all the moon; only in truth we could never get anyone large enough to represent the sun fairly, for the biggest giant that ever lived would be much too small in proportion. The one representing the sun must stand in the middle, and turn slowly round and round. Then let the earth-child turn too, and all the time she is spinning like a top she must be also hastening on in a big ring round the sun; but she must not go too fast, for the little moon-child must keep on running round her all the time. And the moon-child must keep her face turned always to the earth, so that the earth never sees her back. That is an odd thing, isn't it? We have never seen the other side of the moon, which goes round us, always presenting the same face to us.

The earth is not the only world going round the sun; she has many brothers and a sister; some are nearer to the sun than she is, and some are further away, but all circle round the great central light-giver in rings lying one outside the other. These worlds are called planets, and the earth is one of them, and one of the smaller ones, too, nothing so great and important as we might have imagined.

CHAPTER II

HANGING IN SPACE

If you are holding something in your hand and you let it go, what happens? It falls to the ground, of course. Now, why should it do so? You will say: 'How could it do anything else?' But that is only because you are hampered by custom. Try to shake yourself free, and think, Why should it go down instead of up or any other way? The first man who was clever enough to find some sort of an answer to this question was the great philosopher Sir Isaac Newton, though he was not quite the first to be puzzled by it. After years of study he discovered that every thing attracts every other thing in proportion to their masses (which is what you know as weight) and their distance from each other. In more scientific language, we should say every body instead of every thing, for the word body does not only mean a living body, but every lump or mass of matter in the universe. The earth is a body in this sense, and so is the table or anything else you could name. Now as the earth is immeasurably heavier than anything that is on it, it pulls everything toward itself with such force that the little pulls of other things upon each other are not noticed. The earth draws us all toward it. It is holding us down to it every minute of the day. If we want to move we have to exert another force in order to overcome this attraction of the earth, so we exert our own muscles and lift first one foot and then the other away from the earth, and the effort we make in doing this tires us. All the while you are walking or running you are exercising force to lift your feet away from the ground. The pull of the earth is called gravitation. Just remember that, while we go on to something else which is almost as astonishing.

We know that nothing here on earth continues to move for ever; everything has to be kept going. Anything left to itself has a tendency to stop. Why is this? This is because here in the world there is something that fights against the moving thing and tries to stop it, whether it be sent along the ground or thrown up in the air. You know what friction is, of course. If you rub your hands along any rough substance you will quickly feel it, but on a smooth substance you feel it less. That is why if you send a stone spinning along a carpet or a rough road it stops comparatively soon, whereas if you use the same amount of force and send it along a sheet of ice it goes on moving much longer. This kind of resistance, which we call friction, is one of the causes which is at work to bring things to a standstill; and another cause is the resistance of the air, which is friction in another form. It may be a perfectly still day, yet if you are bicycling you are breaking through the air all the time, just as you would be through water in swimming, only the resistance of the air is less than that of water. As the friction or the resistance of the air, or both combined, gradually lessens the pace of the stone you sent off with such force, the gravitation of the earth begins to be felt. When the stone first started the force you gave to it was enough to overcome the gravitation force, but as the stone moves more slowly the earth-pull asserts itself, and the stone drops down to the ground and lies still upon the surface. Now, if there were no friction, and therefore no resistance, there would be no reason why anything once set moving should not go on moving for ever. The force you give to any object you throw is enough to overcome gravitation; and it is only when the first force has been diminished by friction that the earth asserts its authority and pulls the moving object toward it. If it were possible to get outside the air and out of reach of the pull of the earth, we might fling a ball off into space, and it would go on in a straight line until something pulled it to itself by the force of gravity.

Gravitation affects everything connected with the earth; even our air is held to the earth by gravitation. It grows thinner and thinner as we get further away from the earth. At the top of a high mountain the air is so thin that men have difficulty in breathing, and at a certain height they could not breathe at all. As they cannot breathe in very fine air, it is impossible for them to tell by personal experiment exactly where the air ends; but they have tried to find out in other ways, and though different men have come to different conclusions on the subject, it is safe to say that at about two hundred miles above the earth there is nothing that could be called air. Thus we can now picture our spinning earth clothed in a garment of air that clings closely about her, and grows thinner and thinner until it melts away altogether, for there is no air in space.

Now in the beginning God made the world, and set it off by a first impulse. We know nothing about the details, though further on you shall hear what is generally supposed to have taken place; we only know that, at some remote age, this world, probably very different from what it is now, together with the other planets, was sent spinning off into space on its age-long journey. These planets were not sent off at random, but must have had some particular connection with each other and with the sun, for they all belong to one system or family, and act and react on each other. Now, if they had been at rest and not in movement, they would have fallen right into the sun, drawn by the force of gravitation; then they would have been burned up, and there would have been an end of them. But the first force had imparted to them the impulse to go on in a straight line, so when the sun pulled the result was a movement between the two: the planets did not continue to move in a straight line, neither did they fall on to the sun, but they went on a course between the two – that is, a circle – for the sun never let them get right away from him, but compelled them to move in circles round him. There is a very common instance of this kind of thing which we can see, or perhaps feel, every day. If you try to sit still on a bicycle you tumble off, because the earth pulls you down to itself; but if, by using the force of your own muscles, you give the bicycle a forward movement this resists the earth-pull, and the result is the bicycle runs along the ground. It does not get right away from the earth, not even two or three feet above ground; it is held to the earth, but still it goes forward and does not fall over, for the movement is made up of the earth-pull, which holds it to the ground, and the forward movement, which propels it along. Then again, as another instance, if you tie a ball to a string and whirl it round you, so long as you keep on whirling it will not fall to the ground, but the moment you stop down it drops, for there is nothing to fight against the pull of gravitation. Thus we can picture the earth and all the planets as if they were swinging round the sun, held by invisible strings. It is the combination of two forces that keeps them in their places – the first force and the sun's pull. It is very wonderful to think of. Here we are swinging in space on a ball that seems only large to us because we are so much smaller ourselves; there is nothing above or below it but space, yet it travels on day by day and year by year, held by invisible forces that the brain of man has discovered and measured.

Of course, every planet gives a pull at every other planet too, but these pulls are so small compared with that of the sun that we need not at present notice them. Then we come to another point. We said that every body pulled every other body in proportion to their weights and their distance. Now, gravity acts much more strongly when things are near together than when they are far away from each other; so that if a smaller body is near to another somewhat larger than itself, it is pulled by it much more strongly than by a very much larger one at a considerably greater distance. We have an instance of this in the case of the earth and moon: as the earth responds to the pull of the sun, so the moon responds to the pull of the earth. The moon is so comparatively near to the earth that the earth-pull forces her to keep on going round and round, instead of leaving her free to circle round the sun by herself; and yet if you think of it the moon does go round the sun too. Recall that game we had when the sun was in the middle, and the two smaller girls, representing the earth and moon, went round it. The moon-child turned round the earth-child, but all the while the earth-child was going round the sun, so that in a year's time the moon had been all round the sun too, only not in a straight line. The moon is something like a dog who keeps on dancing round and round you when you go for a walk. He does go for the walk too, but he does much more than that in the same time. Thus we have further completed our idea of our world. We see it now hanging in space, with no visible support, held in its place by two mighty forces; spinning on year after year, attended by its satellite the moon, while we run, and walk, and cry, and laugh, and play about on its surface – little atoms who, except for the brain that God has given them, would never even have known that they are continually moving on through endless space.