This same gravitational attraction must be at work among the
Pleiades. They, too, like ourselves, must have bounds and orbits
set and interwoven, revolutions and gyrations far more complex
than the solar system knows. The visual discovery of such motion
of rotation among the Pleiades may be called one of the pressing
problems of astronomy to-day. We feel sure that the time is ripe,
and that the discovery is actually being made at the present
moment: for a generation of men is not too great a period to call a
moment, when we have to deal with cosmic time.
It is indeed the lack of observations extending through sufficient
centuries that stays our hand from grasping the coveted result. The
Pleiades are so far from us that we cannot be sure of changes among
them. Magnitudes are always relative. It matters not how large the
actual movements may be; if they are extremely small in comparison
with our distance, they must shrink to nothingness in our eyes.
Trembling on the verge of invisibility, elusive, they are in that
borderland where science as yet but feels her way, though certain
that the way is there.
The foundations of exact modern knowledge of the group were laid
by Bessel about 1840. With the modesty characteristic of the
great, he says quite simply that he has made a number of measures
of the Pleiades, thinking that the time may come when astronomers
will be able to find some evidence of motion. In this unassuming
way he prefaces what is still the classic model of precision and
thoroughness in work of this kind. Bessel cleared the ground for a
study of inter-stellar motion within the close star-clusters; and
it is probable that only by such study may we hope to demonstrate
the universality of the law of gravitation in cosmic space.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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