Congressional Edition Volume 6061 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ...years longer. A further extension of the work for two years has been made possible through funds supplied by Mr. Ogden Mills, son of the late D.O. Mills. Up to date about 7,200 spectrograms have been taken at Mount Hamilton and 3,700 by the D. O. Mills expedition at Santiago, on nearly 1,400 stars. The northern portion of the program is nearly completed, and two years more should see the southern portions of the work essentially finished, though decades could well be used in investigating the "by-products" which have appeared in the course of the work, and other decades for the much-needed extension of these researches to fainter stars. To give one instance only, at the Santiago station alone 48 spectroscopic binaries have been announced up to May, 1909, and to work up these binary systems adequately and compute their orbits would necessitate at least three years' work. One in every five or six of the northern stars examined has proved to be a binary, and nearly one in five of the stars observed by Prof. 97578--Sm 1910 22 Wright during the first two years and a half of the work of the D. O. Mills expedition. The discovery of so many spectroscopic binaries has greatly complicated the problem of determining the solar motion; moreover, several other complexities have of late been added to the analysis of the results. Recent investigations of the proper motions of the stars made by Kapteyn, Eddington, Dyson, Schwarzschild, and others, have shown that our universe is probably complex rather than homogeneous in respect to its structure, for there seem to be at least two fairly well marked directions of motions among the stars as a whole.1 Moreover, Monck and Kapteyn have pointed out that a considerable majority of stars possessing marked...