But whatever it may be, it is unceasing and
unchanging; for us mortals eternal. We are nearer the
constellation by five or six hundred miles every minute we live;
we are nearer to it now than we were ten years ago by thousands of
millions of miles, and every future generation of our race will be
nearer than its predecessor by thousands of millions of miles.
When, where, and how, if ever, did this journey begin--when,
where, and how, if ever, will it end? This is the greatest of the
unsolved problems of astronomy. An astronomer who should watch the
heavens for ten thousand years might gather some faint suggestion
of an answer, or he might not. All we can do is to seek for some
hints by study and comparison with other stars.
The stars are suns. To put it in another way, the sun is one of
the stars, and rather a small one at that. If the sun is moving in
the way I have described, may not the stars also be in motion,
each on a journey of its own through the wilderness of space? To
this question astronomy gives an affirmative answer. Most of the
stars nearest to us are found to be in motion, some faster than
the sun, some more slowly, and the same is doubtless true of all;
only the century of accurate observations at our disposal does not
show the motion of the distant ones.
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