CHAPTER XX - THE DISTANCES OF THE STARS

Summary

The most arduous among the problems of stellar astronomy was, singularly enough, the first to be attacked. It was attacked, indeed, before the possibility was even remotely discerned that stellar astronomy might come to be regarded as a substantive branch of science. In the hope, not of penetrating the inscrutable secrets of the remote sphere of the fixed stars, but of solving doubts about the motion of the earth, Copernicus, Tycho, and Galileo led the way in the long series of experiments on the apparent displacements of the stars resulting from our own annual travels round the sun. The interest of the question whether such displacements existed or not was for them of a wholly ‘parochial’ kind; it lay in the test they afforded as to the reality of the terrestrial revolutions. Should the stars be found to shift ever so little by the effect of perspective, then the heliocentric theory could no longer be gainsaid; if, on the contrary, they ignored sublunary circlings, the ‘pill’ (as Kepler termed it) to be swallowed by Copernicans was indeed a huge one. For the distances to which the fixed stars had, in that case, to be relegated, seemed in those times monstrous and incredible; and monstrous and incredible they would appear still, were we not forced by irrecusable evidence to believe in them.

From the beginning to the end (so far) of the history of these inquiries, it may be taken almost as an axiom that the largest ostensible parallaxes have been obtained by the worst means.