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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
The facts connected with the light-changes of stars are in the highest degree strange and surprising; and wonder is not lessened by our daily-growing familiarity with them. They are of everyday occurrence, they can be predicted beforehand, in many cases with nearly as close accuracy as an eclipse of the sun or moon, and they affect in manifold ways a great number of objects. Stellar variability is of every kind and degree. With the regularity of clockwork some stars lose and regain a fixed proportion of their light; others show fitful accessions of luminosity succeeded by equally fitful relapses into obscurity; many waver, in appearance lawlessly, about a datum-level of lustre itself perhaps slowly rising or sinking. The rule of change of a great number is that of an evident, though strongly disturbed periodicity; a few seem to spend all their powers of shining in one amazing outburst, after which they return to their pristine invisibility or insignificance.
The amount is as much diversified as the manner of fluctuation. Changes of brightness so minute as almost to defy detection are linked on by a succession of graduated examples to conflagrations in which emissive intensity is multiplied a thousand times or more in a few hours. The range of variation is in some stars sensibly uniform; they subside during each crisis of change to the same precise point of dimness, and recover, without diminution or excess, just so much light as they had before.
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