Word: rigel
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Charles Greeley Abbot, of the Smithsonian Institution who last Spring made scientific history with his measurements of the sun's heat (TIME, May 5), has now, from the Mt. Wilson observatory, analyzed the heat of nine other great stars-Rigel, Vega, Sirius, Procyon, Capella, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Alpha Herculis, Beta Pegasi. He employs the Nichols radiometer, a delicate instrument worked by heat, like the little vanes revolved by sunlight in optician's windows. The stars' light is broken up by the spectroscope into their respective spectra or color bands, the heat in the different parts of which...
...that the heat from stars of the same color type would be greatest in the same parts of their spectra, but surprising differences were found. Vega and Sirius are both blue-white stars, but the maximum heat of Vega is much farther toward the violet than that of Sirius. Rigel (blue) shows two maxima, one of which is in the infrared rays, invisible to the human eye. The apparatus detects differences of a hundred-millionth of a degree of heat. That is not enough, say the astronomers. It must be sharpened to a thousand-millionth, and many fainter stars...