Herschel and the Milky Way

Although Herschel’s discovery of Uranus made his reputation, it was far from being his most important contribution. During the 18th century, astronomers had measured the proper motions of a reasonably large number of stars. (Proper motion is the slow drift of a star with respect to its neighbours, which slowly causes the constellations to change shape. The first few proper motions were announced in 1718 by Halley, who found them by comparing recently observed star positions with data recorded in Ptolemy’s Almagest.) Herschel noted that many of the stars with substantial proper motions are bright, which suggests that they might be nearby. He reasoned that if there is any pattern in the stellar proper motions, it might be due to the motion of the Sun through the field of stars. In 1783 Herschel published an analysis of 19 proper motions and concluded that the Sun is traveling through space in the direction of the constellation Hercules (toward a point called the solar apex). This was later questioned by the 19th-century German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Bessel, who had many more proper motions to work with, but Herschel’s conclusion was ultimately proved correct.

Herschel was not only an excellent observer but also a remarkably inventive thinker in devising simplifying assumptions that allowed him to make theoretical progress. He was one of several people who in the mid- to late 18th century arrived at the idea that the Milky Way has the form of a flattened disk. However, only Herschel actually tried to deduce the structure of this vast star system. If one had a telescope sufficiently powerful to penetrate to the edge of the Milky Way and aimed the telescope in a direction lying in the plane of the Milky Way, one would look through a region dense with stars. In fact, the number of stars seen in the telescope’s field of view could be taken as a measure of the distance from the Sun to the edge of the Milky Way in that direction. Herschel made a large number of such counts, which he called “star gages,” and in 1785 drew the first quantitative chart of the Milky Way’s form. Later, when he realized that his telescope had not actually been powerful enough to penetrate to the galaxy’s edge, he abandoned this drawing. But because there was nothing that might replace it, Herschel’s drawing of the form of the Milky Way was frequently reprinted throughout the 19th century.

Herschel and his sister Caroline Herschel expended prodigious time and effort in cataloging the nebulae. A few small nebulous, or cloudlike, patches in the night sky are visible to the naked eye and had been mentioned by ancient Greek and medieval Arabic astronomers. In 1755 German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that these nebulae might be vast systems of stars, comparable to the Milky Way. These later came to be called “island universes,” but at this stage the notion was purely speculative. Nebulae could be troublesome, since astronomers on the lookout for new comets could easily mistake an uncataloged nebula for a comet. In 1771 French astronomer Charles Messier published a list of 45 nebulae to keep himself and other comet searchers from wasting time. In 1784 his list was expanded to 103. These Messier objects are today favourite objects for amateur astronomers. William Herschel received a copy of one of Messier’s lists. Caroline, who swept for comets by using a special telescope that William had made for her, soon noticed nebulae not on Messier’s list. As a consequence, William became interested in nebulae and systematically searched for them while engaged in other observing chores. Over 20 years he raised the number of known nebulae to about 2,500. It had been known since Galileo that through a good telescope, some nebulae could be resolved into stars. Were the nebulae really all star systems at vast distances from Earth, or were there also regions of true nebulosity, clouds of luminous fluid? Recent drawings of the Orion nebula, when compared with a drawing made by Christiaan Huygens in the 17th century, seemed to show that this nebula had changed form, which implied that it had to be close, relatively small, and not made of stars. Herschel’s opinions changed in the course of his career, but he tended to regard nebulae as star systems in the process of evolution toward denser states, with the evolution driven by universal gravitation. Today it is known that “nebulae” come in several kinds: some are clouds of glowing gas; some are clusters of stars; and some really are galaxies comparable in size to the Milky Way. But this understanding was not possible until the 19th-century development of spectroscopy and the 20th-century measurement of the distance to another galaxy.

Herschel was unusual among the astronomers of his day, because he concerned himself with the larger construction of the heavens and was far less interested in the ordinary business of professional astronomy, which meant making exactingly accurate position measurements. Herschel helped to open the road to a new physical astronomy that really came into its own only in the 20th century. Nevertheless, there were important discoveries to be made with the old style of astronomy, conducted at universities or sponsored by national observatories, ostensibly because of its application to navigation.

English astronomer James Bradley was perhaps the most significant of the old-style 18th-century observers. High-precision measurements of star positions that he made in the 1720s led him to the discovery of the aberration of starlight. It had been known since the late 17th century that light has a finite speed. Danish astronomer Ole Rømer used that idea in 1676 to explain why the eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter appear to run alternately about 10 minutes ahead of or behind schedule over the course of a year. Christiaan Huygens then worked out a numerical estimate for the speed of light that was published in his Traité de la Lumière (Treatise on Light, 1690). Bradley discovered that the fixed stars too suffer apparent annual changes in their positions. For example, a star near the pole of the ecliptic (seen at right angles to the plane of Earth’s orbit) appears to execute a small circular motion, of 20 seconds of arc radius, in the course of a year. A second discovery by Bradley introduced an even more troublesome complication—the nutation (or nodding) of Earth’s axis, which has an amplitude of about 8 seconds. Because of aberration and nutation, the fullest possible precision of astronomical observations could not be achieved unless the observations were corrected for these effects.

Precise calculations and observations

A major aspect of 19th-century astronomy was the move toward greater precision both in methods of calculation and in quantitative methods of observation. Here the natural successor to Bradley was Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, who reduced Bradley’s enormous collection of star positions for aberration and nutation and in 1818 published the results in a new star catalog of unprecedented accuracy, the Fundamenta Astronomiae (“Foundations of Astronomy”).

No better demonstration of improved methods could be wished for than the near-simultaneous measurements of stellar parallaxes by Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve of the star Vega in 1837, by Bessel of the star 61 Cygni in 1838, and by Scottish astronomer Thomas Henderson of the triple star Alpha Centauri in 1838. The annual parallax is the tiny back-and-forth shift in the direction of a relatively nearby star, with respect to more-distant background stars, caused by the fact that Earth changes its vantage point over the course of a year. Since the acceptance of Copernicus’s moving Earth, astronomers had known that stellar parallax must exist. But the effect is so small (because the diameter of Earth’s orbit is tiny compared with the distance of even the nearest stars) that it had resisted all efforts at detection. For example, the parallax of 61 Cygni is 0.287 seconds of arc (1 second of arc = 1/3,600 of a degree). The shift from parallax was observed only after the development of precise astronomical instruments, such as the heliometer that German physicist and optician Joseph von Fraunhofer built for Bessel, that could measure stellar positions to the necessary accuracy of hundredths of a second of arc. (In the preceding century Bradley, who could measure stellar positions only with an accuracy of half a second of arc, had been making a failed attempt to detect stellar parallax when he stumbled instead on the aberration of light.) The successful measurement of stellar parallaxes gave for the first time accurate values for the distances of stars other than the Sun.

By about 1820 it was clear that Uranus was not keeping to the schedule of motion predicted for it. In the 1840s John Couch Adams in England and Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier in France independently sought to explain the anomaly through the gravitational attraction of an undiscovered planet outside the orbit of Uranus. Both Adams and Le Verrier assumed the rough validity of the Titius-Bode law to make their calculations easier. Adams predicted a place in the zodiac where astronomers should look, but at first he could not get the English astronomical community to tackle the job. Le Verrier had better luck, for his prediction was taken up immediately by Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory, who found the new planet Neptune in 1846, near the place in the sky where Le Verrier said it would be. This episode caused a stormy period in English-French scientific relations, as well as recriminations in the English astronomical community for the failure to pursue Adams’s prediction in a timely way.

In Ireland a wealthy amateur, William Parsons, 3rd earl of Rosse, inspired by Herschel’s example, continued the quest for larger and better telescopes. Because Herschel had treated the optics of his large telescopes as trade secrets, Rosse had to do all his own design by trial and error. In 1839 Rosse built a 36-inch (91-cm) reflecting telescope, with the mirror made of polished metal, and then, in 1845, the 72-inch (183-cm) “Leviathan of Parsonstown.” That year, using this gigantic instrument, Rosse observed and sketched the spiral form of the nebula known as Messier 51. Three years later he sketched the spiral shape of Messier 99. Rosse and his helpers eventually described more than 60 spiral nebulae.