Proceedings American Philosophical Society Vol 47 1908

Author : American Philosophical Society
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781334460852
Total Pages : 662 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (68 download)

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Download or read book Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1912, Vol. 51 written by American Philosophical Society and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1912, Vol. 51: Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge The problem Of determining the depth Of the Milky Way, as accurately as possible, is one which has now engaged my attention for over twenty years, and I will therefore take this occasion to bring together the results at which I have arrived, partly because they are of high general interest, and partly because the progress thus made will prove instructive as to the methods which must be adopted for the measurement of the distances of the most remote Objects Of the sidereal universe. Here we have to deal with dis tances so immense that the method of annual parallaxes, commonly used for the stars comparatively near the sun, utterly fails; and recourse must be had to other methods which will serve for the greatest distances to which our modern giant telescopes can penetrate. Alpha Centauri, the nearest of the fixed stars, was also the first to be successfully measured for parallax, by Thomas Henderson, Of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1831 but the work was not reduced till January, 1839, and meanwhile Bessel had measured the parallax of 61 Cygni in 1838 and promptly published the result Of his triumph. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.