THE BOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2009, 19 February 1907, Page 3

THE BOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE

Do the world’s great telescopes spy out the limits of our universe? *\ro there spaces in the sky lioyo i.l winch there are no moro stars? That is toe question on which the scho 4s of astronomical thought are it present sharply divided. In tlio 'ino veil ot stars which covers the liea ions, as seen through a great telescope, a veil with a mesh so fine that the specks of starry light, in it- number 150,000,000, there are boles and rifts and black spots; and some of them have been known to astrolioiu irs since the fifteenth century, and were described in the eighteenth. Jnr j have been sometimes expressly called “coal sacks,” from their blackness; and what we want to know is whether Herschel’s phrase was right w-lien in examining one of them lie said to his favorite sister, Caroline Herschel: “Hier ist. wahrhaftig _ ein Loch in Himmel” (Here, truly, is a hole in tlio heavens). Are they holes, ore are they merely funnels beyond which, and beyond tlio powers of any telescope, lie other stars almost inconceivably distant? Or, again, are they patches of dark nebula, aonluminous, “unclectrifiod,” unlit? When the new star in Perseus blazed into light some years ago, the as-' tronomors of tho earth perceived the spectacle of a nebula, hitherto unporceived, being “lit up.” Are there vast expanses in the sky which shut off light? Or, again, is there enough cosmic dust in the universe or a largo enough number of dark bodies planets, meteorites, and the like to exclude tlio gleams of stars if those stars bo far enough distant? To tlio man armed with a little knowledge and an intelligent curiosity the an.swer would seem to bo an affirmative one. If there at least eight dull planets to our shining sun, surely the number of dark bodies ill the . universe must transcend tho number of the starry suns, as—to borrow a simile of Sir Robert Ball—tlie miniher of horseshoes in a country exceeds tlie red-hot ones. But, as Air. J. E. Gore, F.R.A.S., has recently pointed out, this is not the opinion of several astronomers, with Professor Simon Newcomb at tlieir head, who believe that tlie holes in the starry -"veil are real holes; that beyond them are no stars, and that when we look through them we look beyond the edge of tho universe. There is, strange as it may seem, no positive evidence of the existence ol dark bodies in the sky, or or of any matter that would shut off the light of tlie most distant stars