Astronomical DiscoveryTurner, H. H. (Herbert Hall)
History
Astronomical Discovery
Turner, H. H. (Herbert Hall)
Astronomy -- History
When it became generally established that this periodicity existed, Rudolf
Wolf of Zurich collected the facts about sun-spots from the earliest
possible date, and represented this history by a series of numbers which
are still called Wolf's Sun-Spot Numbers. You will see from the diagram
the obvious rise and fall for eleven years,--not ten years, as Schwabe
thought, but just a little over eleven years. The facts are, however,
given more completely by the work done at the Royal Observatory at
Greenwich. It is part of the regular daily work of that Observatory to
photograph the sun at least twice. Many days are of course cloudy or wet,
so that photographs cannot be obtained; but there are available
photographs similarly taken in India or in Mauritius, where the weather is
more favourable, and from these the gaps are so well filled up that very
few days, if any, during the whole year are left without some photograph
of the sun's surface. On these photographs the positions and the areas of
the spots are carefully measured under a microscope, and the results when
submitted to certain necessary calculations are published year by year. It
is clearly a more accurate estimate of the spottedness of the sun to take
the total _area_ of all the spots rather than their mere _number_, for in
the latter case a large spot and a small one count equally. Hence the
Greenwich records will perhaps give us an even better idea of the
periodicity than Wolf's numbers. Now, at the same observatory magnetic
observations are also made continuously. If a magnet be suspended freely
we are accustomed to say that it will point to the North Pole; but this is
only very roughly true. In the first place, it is probably well known to
you that there is a considerable deviation from due north owing to the
fact that the magnetic North Pole is not the same as the geographical
North Pole; but this for the present need not concern us. What does
concern us is, that if the needle is hung up and left long enough to come
to rest, it does not then remain steadily at rest, but executes slow and
small oscillations backwards and forwards, up and down, throughout the
day; repeating nearly the same oscillations on the following day, but at
the same time gradually changing its behaviour so as to oscillate
differently in summer and winter. These changes are very small, and would
pass unnoticed by the naked eye; but when carefully watched through a
telescope, or better still, when photographed by some apparatus which will
at the same time magnify them, they can be rendered easily visible. When
the history of these changes is traced it is seen at once that there is a
manifest connection with the cycle of sun-spot changes; for instance, if
we measure the range of swing backwards and forwards during the day and
take the average for all the days in the year, and then compare this with
the average number of sun-spots, we shall see that the averages rise and
fall together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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