Curiosities of the Sky

Suppose it were possible for the world to take fire and burn up -- as some pessimists think that it will do when the Divine wrath shall have sufficiently accumulated against it -- nobody out of our own little corner of space would ever be aware of the catastrophe! With all their telescopes, the astronomers living in the golden light of Arcturus or the diamond blaze of Canopus would be unable to detect the least glimmer of the conflagration that had destroyed the seat of Adam and his descendents, just as now they are totally ignorant of its existence.

But at least fifteen times in the course of recorded history men looking out from the earth have beheld in the remote depths of space great outbursts of fiery light, some of them more splendidly luminous than anything else in the firmament except the sun! If they were conflagrations, how many million worlds like ours were required to feed their blaze?

It is probable that "temporary" or "new" stars, as these wonderful apparitions are called, really are conflagrations; not in the sense of a bonfire or a burning house or city, but in that of a sudden eruption of inconceivable heat and light, such as would result from the stripping off the shell of an encrusted sun or the crashing together of two mighty orbs flying through space with a hundred times the velocity of the swiftest cannon-shot.

Temporary stars are the rarest and most erratic of astronomical phenomena. The earliest records relating to them are not very clear, and we cannot in every instance be certain that it was one of these appearances that the ignorant and superstitious old chroniclers are trying to describe. The first temporary star that we are absolutely sure of appeared in 1572, and is known as "Tycho's Star," because the celebrated Danish astronomer (whose remains, with his gold-and-silver artificial nose -- made necessary by a duel -- still intact, were disinterred and reburied in 1901) was the first to perceive it in the sky, and the most assiduous and successful in his studies of it. As the first fully accredited representative of its class, this new star made its entry upon the scene with becoming éclat. It is characteristic of these phenomena that they burst into view with amazing suddenness, and, of course, entirely unexpectedly. Tycho's star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, near a now well-known and much-watched little star named Kappa, on the evening of November 11, 1572. The story has often been repeated, but it never loses interest, how Tycho, going home that evening, saw people in the street pointing and staring at the sky directly over their heads, and following the direction of their hands and eyes he was astonished to see, near the zenith, an unknown star of surpassing brilliance. It outshone the planet Jupiter, and was therefore far brighter than the first magnitude. There was not another star in the heavens that could be compared with it in splendor. Tycho was not in all respects free from the superstitions of his time -- and who is? -- but he had the true